By Jack M. Germain LinuxInsider Part of the ECT News Network
11/04/09 4:00 AM PT
Yahoo Traffic Server is an app server for builders of cloud services. The software package enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo has now open sourced a version of the application through Apache.
In a move that resembles a major food vendor giving away its prize
recipe -- minus the secret sauce -- to all of its customers and competitors, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) on
Monday donated the source code for its Traffic Server software to the
Apache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator Project.
Yahoo hopes to grow a community of product
users who return to use the full recipe rather than
trying to make the recipe work on their own. Yahoo intends to build a
robust community of developers around the open source Traffic Server,
the company said.
The release of the Traffic Server code to the open source community
marks the second time in five months that Yahoo made a significant contribution to
the FOSS world.
"The obvious target is developers. Yahoo had a pretty strong development community, which faded in the last few years," Jay Lyman, analyst with the 451 Group, told LinuxInsider.
Playing the Field
Changes in the Web marketplace may be influencing Yahoo to work more
favorably with the open source community, suggested Lyman. Providing
the source code may be the company's way of trying to remain pertinent
with a product it cannot monetize, he suggested.
However, donating the code has nothing to do with failed efforts to make
money from direct sales , according to Yahoo officials -- in fact, the company plans to release more of its products as open source.
"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 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 Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of Cloud Computing
at Yahoo.
Releasing an open source version of Traffic Server lets the company
share a core piece of technology with the open source world and
signals Yahoo's intention to build a community of developers to take
the software to the next level, Shugar explained.
Better Performance
Traffic Server took Yahoo engineers eight years to develop. It's a
high-performance application server for builders of cloud services.
The software package enables session management, authentication,
configuration management, load balancing and routing for an entire
cloud computing stack.
The open source version of Traffic Server gives organizations fast,
reliable and scalable access to cached online content, according to
Yahoo. Plus, it enables quicker responses to requests for stored Web
objects, such as files, news articles or images. This reduces
bandwidth usage and costs.
The software's framework design offers users low latency. Also,
its plug-in architecture makes it customizable to fit different system
needs, according to Yahoo.
How It Works
Traffic Server handles some 30 billion Web objects a day across the
Yahoo network. The software works within the company's global network
of data centers to choose the closest servers to store and access
cached content for increased speed.
Traffic Server handles more than 30,000 requests per second per
server. It serves more than 400 terabytes of data per day, said
Yahoo.
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