by Stephen Shankland
Sure, rivals could profit from Yahoo's release of Traffic Server as open-source software. But overall, Yahoo bets it'll gain more than it loses by giving it away.
Betting that the benefits of the move will outweigh the risks, Yahoo has released the source code underlying in-house software called Traffic Server that can speed up Web site operations...
The software works by moving some data and operations closer on the Internet to the people trying using those services. Yahoo released it as an "incubator" project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, a seasoned organization for managing open-source projects and also the site that houses the Hadoop open-source project Yahoo favors for large-scale data-processing challenges.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
"We've donated Traffic Server to Apache because we think it's a great piece of code, and we want to build a community around that in the same manner we built a community out of Hadoop," Shugar said in an interview.
Traffic Server is a battle-hardened package with more than 200,000 lines of C++ code. Yahoo originally got the software through its acquisition of Inktomi earlier this decade, and it's been using it ever since. Today, the software delivers 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data each day.
And Yahoo can rightly be proud of Traffic Server's performance: that comes from a surprisingly small number of Yahoo servers--between 100 and 150, said Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of data services at Yahoo. The software is set up particularly to run multiple tasks at the same time, a design well-suited to today's servers with multicore, multithreaded processors.
Source code is what humans write in a higher-level programming language; only after it's been translated into binary machine code can a computer actually run that program. When associated with an open-source project, this software is available for anyone to see, modify, and distribute, in contrast to the locked-down world of proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows. So in effect, Yahoo is allowing others not only to use Traffic Server for their own ends, but also to modify it--for example, by taking advantage of its ability at to accept plug-ins that can adapt it for different tasks.
Sure, rivals could profit from Yahoo's release of Traffic Server as open-source software. But overall, Yahoo bets it'll gain more than it loses by giving it away.
Betting that the benefits of the move will outweigh the risks, Yahoo has released the source code underlying in-house software called Traffic Server that can speed up Web site operations...
The software works by moving some data and operations closer on the Internet to the people trying using those services. Yahoo released it as an "incubator" project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, a seasoned organization for managing open-source projects and also the site that houses the Hadoop open-source project Yahoo favors for large-scale data-processing challenges.
Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
"We've donated Traffic Server to Apache because we think it's a great piece of code, and we want to build a community around that in the same manner we built a community out of Hadoop," Shugar said in an interview.
Traffic Server is a battle-hardened package with more than 200,000 lines of C++ code. Yahoo originally got the software through its acquisition of Inktomi earlier this decade, and it's been using it ever since. Today, the software delivers 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data each day.
And Yahoo can rightly be proud of Traffic Server's performance: that comes from a surprisingly small number of Yahoo servers--between 100 and 150, said Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of data services at Yahoo. The software is set up particularly to run multiple tasks at the same time, a design well-suited to today's servers with multicore, multithreaded processors.
Source code is what humans write in a higher-level programming language; only after it's been translated into binary machine code can a computer actually run that program. When associated with an open-source project, this software is available for anyone to see, modify, and distribute, in contrast to the locked-down world of proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows. So in effect, Yahoo is allowing others not only to use Traffic Server for their own ends, but also to modify it--for example, by taking advantage of its ability at to accept plug-ins that can adapt it for different tasks.
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