Apache Server Cloud Content Delivery Is All Go

The Apache Software Foundation has announced version 3 of Traffic Server, a cloud-computing “edge” service. The software can handle requests in and out of the cloud, both by serving static content — images, JavaScript, CSS and HTML files, and routing requests for dynamic content to a Web server, such as the Apache HTTP Server, ASF said.

“Traffic Server is battle-hardened, serving terabytes of data in real-life deployments where immediate content delivery is critical,” Apache Traffic Server vice president Leif Hedstrom said in a statement. “V3.0.0 builds upon that foundation, with new features and functionality, improved efficiency and performance, [and] increased uptime, and overall [it is] easier to use.”

Rapid Massive Content Delivery

Apache Traffic Server is a fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1-compliant caching proxy server designed to improve caching, proxying, speed, extensibility and reliability, ASF officials said. The traffic server improves response time while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently requested Web pages, images and Web service calls.

It can also add requests to keep-alive, filter or anonymise content, or load-balance by adding a proxy layer, ASF said. The new version of the Apache Traffic Server also scales to handle tens of thousands of requests per second and handles hundreds of terabytes of data, both as forward and reverse proxies.

ASF officials said the Apache Traffic Server version 3.0 has been benchmarked to handle more than of 200,000 requests per second — a 277 percent improvement over version 2.0. Used in production in a variety of large-scale deployments, companies such as Yahoo rely on Apache Traffic Server to handle over 400 terabytes of traffic, AFS officials said.

Yahoo has used the Apache Traffic Server to serve more than 30 billion objects daily across its various properties, including the Yahoo homepage, and its Sports, Mail and Finance sites, ASF said.

The software was originally developed by Inktomi and acquired by Yahoo in 2002. The search company maintained the code until its open source release in August 2009. Traffic Server entered the Apache Incubator in June 2009, graduated as a Top-Level Project in April 2010 and the company released v2.0 the following month.

The Apache Traffic Server software is released under the Apache Licence v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project, ASF said. A management committee guides the project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Traffic Server source code, documentation and related resources are available for download.