| Developer(s) | Apache Software Foundation |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 3.0.2 / December 7, 2011 |
| Preview release | 3.1.1 / November 18, 2011 |
| Written in | C++ |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Web server |
| License | Apache License 2.0[1] |
| Website | http://trafficserver.apache.org/ |
The Apache Traffic Server (TS) is a modular, high-performance reverse proxy and forward proxy server, generally comparable to Nginx and Squid. It was created by Inktomi, and distributed as a commercial product called the Inktomi Traffic Server, before Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo!. Yahoo!'s OStatic guest post Yahoo's Cloud Team Open Sources Traffic Server states that Yahoo! uses TS in production to serve more than 30 Billion objects per day on sites like the Yahoo! homepage, and Yahoo! Sports, Mail, and Finance [2]. Yahoo! released the TS source to Apache as an Apache Incubator project in July 2009 [3]. On April 21, 2010, the Apache board accepted Traffic Server as a TLP, graduating the project out of incubation[4]. TS is now in version 3.0.2, with a 3.1.1 developers release available for testing new features in the 3.x branch.
The OStatic post describes TS as shipping "... with not only an HTTP web proxy and caching solution, but also ... a server framework, with which you can build very fast servers for other protocols". Traffic Server has been benchmarked to handle 200,000 requests per second or more (small objects out of cache) [5]. At a talk at the 2009 Cloud Computing Expo, members of the Yahoo! TS team stated that TS is used in production at Yahoo! to handle 400TB of traffic per day using only 150 commodity machines. The OStatic post describes TS as the "product of literally hundreds of developer-years".
In the context of cloud computing, TS would sit conceptually at the edge of the cloud, routing requests as they come in. It could be described as a highway into and out of the cloud. In Yahoo!, it is used for the edge services shown in the graphic distributed at the 2009 Cloud Computing Expo depicting Yahoo!'s private cloud architecture. In practical terms, a typical server configuration might use TS to serve static content, such as images and JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, and route requests for dynamic content to a web server such as Apache HTTP Server.
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