Yahoo has taken "its second major step in five months toward
open-source cloud computing ... [by introducing] an open-source version of
Traffic Server, a high-performance application server for builders of cloud
services," the company said in a news release Nov. 2. "Traffic Server
enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load
balancing and routing for an entire cloud computing stack."
Yahoo has moved to open-source its Traffic Server technology through the
Apache Software Foundation.
Yahoo Traffic Server "follows the Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop as
another example of Yahoo's ... commitment to open-source cloud computing
initiatives. Yahoo has donated the Traffic Server code to The Apache Software
Foundation through the Apache Incubator, and intends to build a robust community
of developers around the open-source Traffic Server. Shelton Shugar, senior
vice president of Cloud Computing at Yahoo, will be discussing the new
technology [Nov. 3] at the Cloud Computing Expo" in Santa
Clara, Calif., the company
said.
"We see Traffic Server as an essential building block for cloud computing,
and at Yahoo, it's integral to our edge services, online storage and cloud
serving. The open-sourcing of Traffic Server is representative of our companywide
commitment to sharing technology innovation with the open-source community, as
well as our broader intention to continue to open-source our cloud technologies
as they mature," Shugar said in the statement. "By releasing an open-source
version of Traffic Server, we are sharing a core piece of technology with the
open-source world, while also signaling our intention to build a community of
developers to take it to the next level."
Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of storage and edge services at Yahoo, said the
Traffic Server technology comes from Yahoo's acquisition of Inktomi in 2002.
"And for two years it's been going through performance optimization, so
it's a fairly scalable service manager," he said.
The Yahoo news release continued, "With the open-source version of
Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from fast, reliable and scalable access
to cached online content. In addition, Traffic Server enables speeded responses
to requests for stored Web objects, such as files, news articles or images,
reducing bandwidth usage and costs.
"The low-latency, extensible framework of Traffic Server makes it ideal
for delivering Web traffic at high rates, and its 'plug-in' architecture makes
it customizable to fit different system needs."
At
Yahoo's recent Open Hack Day in New York
Oct. 9, Sam Pullara, chief technologist at Yahoo, said the company would soon
be open-sourcing Traffic Server.
"Yahoo's release of Traffic Server represents more than eight years of
active use and quality engineering in a product that currently serves more than
30 billion Web objects a day across the Yahoo network. The company's global
network of data centers allows Traffic Server to choose the closest servers to
store and access cached content for increased speed. Traffic Server is widely
deployed at Yahoo, capable of handling more than 30,000 requests per second per
server and it currently serves more than 400TB of data per day," the Yahoo
statement said.
In addition, the release said, "Yahoo is also announcing an update to
the Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop, now deployed extensively in Yahoo data
centers worldwide. Since the initial Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop was announced
in June 2009, Yahoo has published multiple updates to the code. These include
new features and bug fixes that continue to improve robustness, security,
performance and operability of Hadoop for ongoing large-scale
deployments."
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