In a step towards open source cloud computing Yahoo! has unveiled an open source version of Traffic server, an application server for builders of cloud services.
Traffic server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for a cloud computing stack. Yahoo! has donated the Traffic Server code to The Apache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator project, and intends to build community of developers around the open source Traffic Server.
According to Yahoo!, an open source version of Traffic Server allows organisations to benefit from faster access to cached online content and also enables faster 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 helps in delivering web traffic at higher rates, and its plug-in architecture makes it customisable to fit different system requirements.
The company claims that its global network of data centres allows traffic server to choose the closest servers to store and access cached content for increased speed. And it is capable of handling more than 30,000 requests per second per server and it currently serves more than 400 terabytes of data per day.
Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!, said: “We see traffic server as an essential building block for cloud computing, and at Yahoo!, it’s integral to our edge services, on-line storage and cloud serving. The open-sourcing of traffic server is representative of our company-wide 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.
“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.”
Yahoo! has also announced an update to the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop, deployed in Yahoo! data centres worldwide. Since its initial launch in June 2009, the company has published multiple updates to the code including new features and bug fixes that continue to improve security, performance, and operability of Hadoop for ongoing large scale deployments.
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