Yahoo! Traffic Server donated to Apache

Yahoo! has donated its Traffic Server software to the Apache Software Foundation as open source. Traffic Server is a high performance HTTP/1.1 caching proxy server which Yahoo has used internally since acquiring its original developers, Inktomi, in 2002. Yahoo uses Traffic Server to serve around 400TB of data a day on Yahoo!'s network and according to the developers, the software is capable of handing over 30,000 requests per second per server.

Traffic Server provides session and configuration management, load balancing, authentication and routing and is designed for high volume web sites where, for example, the administrators may want to create complex routing for requests for files, images and other web objects. A plug in architecture allows developers to extend the Traffic Server to handle different tasks.

The Traffic Server has been moved into the Apache Incubator where it will be brought up to Apache Software Foundation standards. In the past few months since it was proposed as an Apache project the Yahoo! developers have been cleaning the code, fixing issues detected by Coverity scans and ensuring that license issues have been resolved. Traffic Server is made up of over 300,000 lines of C/C++ code and long term goals for the project include porting to other Unix systems beyond Linux, making the software fully 64-bit and adding features such as native IPV6 support.

Yahoo! hopes that the move to open source under the Apache Software Foundation umbrella will help build a strong community around what Shelton Shugar, senior VP of Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, calls "an essential building block of cloud computing".

(djwm)