Yahoo open sources Traffic Server

System code donated to Apache's Incubator project.

Yahoo has sought to increase its profile in the cloud computing community by open sourcing its high-performance Traffic Server for webmasters using cloud services.

The company said that the open-source version offers session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing for an entire cloud computing stack.

Traffic Server allows companies to better manage web traffic, according to Yahoo, and speeds up requests for files, news articles or images. The web giant also said that it can help to reduce bandwidth usage and costs.

Yahoo uses the system internally and claims that it is capable of more than 30,000 requests per second per server, and currently serves more than 400TB of data per day.

The open-source Traffic Server code is available now through the Apache Software Foundation's Incubator project, and Yahoo is seeking to build a strong developer community around the system.

"We see Traffic Server as an essential building block for cloud computing, and at Yahoo it is integral to our edge services, online storage and cloud serving," said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo.

"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.

He said the firm also intends to build a community of developers in order to "take it to the next level".

Yahoo also announced an update to its distribution of Hadoop, the firm's Java software framework, including new features and bug fixes.