Traffic Server Apache...

By Mathieu CARBONNEAUX

In 2002, Yahoo acquired Inktomi for €1.63M, a company that was developing the Traffic Server software… Yahoo continued to evolve Traffic Server and uses it extensively in its infrastructure…

In 2009, Yahoo decided to open source it and transfer the project to the Apache Foundation…

Since then, the product has evolved significantly…

It closely resembles what SteelApp Traffic Manager from Riverbed (formerly Zeus Traffic Manager) does, which is a reverse proxy that allows traffic manipulation in all directions…

but it still falls short… but this looks promising! Stay tuned!

It can operate as:

  • Reverse Proxy / Cache,
  • Forward Proxy,
  • Transparent Proxy,

Some features:

  • it is “event driven” (like lighttpd and nginx) and multithreaded
  • it supports cache hierarchies
  • it supports hot modification by default
  • hot monitoring
  • it allows DNS resolution per server (split DNS)
  • you can manipulate traffic with Lua and Tcl
  • it is pluggable
  • supports ESI
  • supports SPDY and SSL (supporting SNI)
  • it runs natively in a cluster (with configuration replication)
  • it allows centralized log collection
  • it only supports HTTP protocol at the moment
  • but in the future they plan to support FastCGI and AJP for backends
  • it supports load balancing but not health checks

Some links on the subject: