With 600 million unique visits per month, Yahoo sees a large amount of traffic to its sites. In order to maintain sites in the cloud, Yahoo uses Traffic Server, a piece of software initially acquired via Inktomi, to support this massive amount of traffic.

Tomorrow, Yahoo will be debuting an open source version of Traffic Server. The code is available through the Incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. Yahoo says that with the open source version of Traffic Server, organizations can benefit from access to cached online content. In addition, Traffic Server enables faster responses to requests for stored Web objects, such as files, news articles or images.

The company’s global network of data centers allows Traffic Server to choose the closest servers to store and access cached content for increased speed. Traffic Server is capable of handling more than 30,000 requests per second per server and it currently serves more than 400 terabytes of data per day.