According to Yahoo, it uses the technology for edge caching and processing, along with load balancing and server-virtualization, among other tasks; and the company's gift of it to The Apache Software Foundation may herald significant advantages for webmasters at all levels.
Yahoo acquired the Traffic Server technology when it bought Inktomi. It reportedly handles 400 terabytes of data daily, with more than 30,000 requests per second and claims that it is a highly extensible way to speed consumer access to content.
"It is a very mature, very reliable piece of technology," Yahoo Senior VP of Cloud Computing, Shelton Shugar, said. "In some form, it supports more than half of Yahoo's traffic."
"The folks who will be interested in this are people building clouds and using these services," Shugar said. "They'll understand the value of Traffic Server and what they'll be able to with it. There really isn't much out there that compares with this from a scalability standpoint."
The streamlined Traffic Server version given to the Apache Incubator program was stripped of features that outside companies would not need.
"This is part of our overhaul strategy to open source cloud services that are mature and not laden with Yahoo-specific stuff that wouldn't make sense for open source," Shugar added.
The move follows an earlier release to open source of Yahoo's Hadoop distributed data platform and Amazon's release of relational database services.
While Traffic Server is intended to serve as a proxy cache, its powerful API and other features reportedly make it Yahoo's choice for HTTP session management.
"You can poke around with various headers and inject content and direct client requests to different backends, all through a relatively clean API," Yahoo VP of Content Storage, Delivery, and Edge, Chuck Neerdaels, said. "It's simple enough for a small operation to pick it up quickly, but the big players can pick it up and it will scale to meet their needs pretty impressively."
The release of the technology will help build a developer community and facilitate the company's growth into the future.
"We can literally hire people and work with research institutes who walk in the door knowing the technology we use," Shugar added.