Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), an Internet company, took its second major step in five months towards open-source cloud computing, debuting an open source version of Traffic Server, a high performance application server for builders of cloud services. Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack.

It follows the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop as another example of Yahoo!’s unprecedented 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 tomorrow at the Cloud Computing Expo.

“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,” said Shugar. “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.”

Open-Source Traffic Server
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.

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 400 terabytes of data per day.

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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