Apache Traffic Server v7.0.0 Released

http://trafficserver.apache.org/downloads

Posted at 09:46AM Nov 08, 2016 by bcall in Releases  |  Comments [0]  | 

The Apache Traffic Server Project’s Next Chapter

By Bryan Call, Apache Traffic Server PMC Chair, Yahoo Distinguished Software Engineer

Last week, the ATS Community held a productive and informative Apache Traffic Server (ATS) Fall Summit, hosted by LinkedIn in Sunnyvale CA. At a hackathon during the Summit, we fixed bugs, cleaned up code, users were able to spend time with experts on ATS and have their questions answered, and the next release candidate for ATS 7.0.0 was made public. There were talks on operations, new and upcoming features, and supporting products. More than 80 people registered for the event and we had a packed room with remote video conferencing.

I have been attending the ATS Summits since their inception in 2010 and have had the pleasure of being involved with the Apache Traffic Server Project for the last nine years. I was also part of the team at Yahoo that open sourced the code to Apache. Today, I am honored to serve as the new Chair and VP of the ATS Project, having been elected to the position by the ATS community a couple weeks ago [1].

Traffic Server was originally created by Inktomi and distributed as a commercial product. After Yahoo acquired Inktomi, Yahoo open sourced Traffic Server and submitted it to the Apache Incubator in July 2009.

Since graduating as Apache Traffic Server (an Apache Top-Level Project as of April 2010), many large and small companies use it for caching and proxying HTTP requests. ATS supports HTTP/2, HTTP/1.1, TLS, and many other standards. The Apache Committers on the project are actively involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – whose mission it is to “make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet” – to make sure ATS is able to support the latest standards going forward.

Many companies have greatly benefited from the open sourcing of ATS; numerous industry colleagues and invested individuals have improved the project by fixing bugs and adding features, tests, and documentation. An example is Yahoo, which uses ATS for nearly all of its incoming HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 traffic. It is a common layer that all users go through before making a request to the origin server. Having a common layer has made it easier for Yahoo to deploy security fixes and updates extremely quickly. ATS is used as a caching proxy in locations worldwide and is also used to proxy requests for dynamic content from remote locations through already-established persistent connections. This decreases the latency for users when their cacheable content can be served, and connection establishments can be made to a nearby server.

The ATS PMC and I will focus on continuing to increase the ATS user base and having more developers contribute to the project. The ATS community welcomes other companies’ contributions and enhancements to the software through a well-established process with Apache. Unlike other commercial products, ATS has no limits or restrictions with accepting open source contributions.

Moving forward, we would also like to focus on three specific areas of ATS as a means of increasing the user base, while maintaining the performance advantage of the server: ease of use, features, and stability.

I support the further simplification of the configuration of ATS to make it so that end users can quickly get a server up with little effort. Common requirements should be easy to configure, while continuing to allow users to write custom plugins for more advanced requirements.

Adding new features to ATS is important and there are a lot of new drafts and standards currently being worked on in IETF with HTTP, TLS, and QUIC that will improve user experience. ATS will need to continue to support the latest standards that allow deployments of ATS to decrease the latency for the users. Having our developers attend the IETF meetings and participate in the decision-making is key to our ability to keep on top of these latest developments.

Stability is a fundamental requirement for a proxy server. Since all the incoming HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 traffic is handled by the server, it must be stable and resilient. We are continually working on improving our continuous integration and testing. We are making it easier for developers to write testing and run tests before making contributions to the code.

The ATS community is a welcoming group of people that encourages contributions and input from users, and I am excited to help lead the Project into its next chapter. Please feel free to join the mailing lists, attend one of our events such as the recent ATS Summit, or jump on IRC to talk to the users and developers of this project. We invite you to learn more about ATS at http://trafficserver.apache.org.

Posted at 09:00AM Nov 01, 2016 by bcall in General  |  Comments [0]  | 

Fall 2015 Apache Traffic Server Summit (Nov 15-17th)

Posted at 09:00PM Sep 21, 2015 by jpeach in General  |  Comments [6]  | 

Traffic Server 6.0 released

Posted at 08:57PM Sep 21, 2015 by jpeach in Releases  |  Comments [0]  | 

Apache Traffic Server 4.2.1 is released

The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Traffic Server project are pleased to announce the release of Apache Traffic Server v4.2.1! This is our latest stable release, and is immediately available for download at:

http://trafficserver.apache.org/downloads

Upgrading from the previous v3.2 release to v4.x should be done with care, since the cache is not backwards compatible. This means upgrading will cause the cache to be reinitialized. More details on upgrading is available on the Wiki:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/TS/Upgrading+to+v4.0

Upgrading from 4.1.x should be seamless.

Posted at 10:58AM Apr 29, 2014 by sorber in Releases  |  Comments [0]  | 

Apache Traffic Server 4.2.0 is released

Posted at 01:22PM Mar 21, 2014 by jpeach in Releases  |  Comments [0]  | 

Traffic Server Documentation now officially on ReadTheDocs

Today we have officially moved Apache Traffic Server's documentation over to Read the Docs.

We have worked for quite some time now to move all of our documentation to Sphinx and into the git repository. This makes it simpler for both developers and users to contribute documentation updates.

Perhaps my favourite feature of RTD is how versatile they are. We now build the HTML with the Reference documentation from the same source we build the man pages. We can output epub and PDF, which you can download from the site. Best of all: It looks perfect on mobile devices.

Enjoy our new docs: http://trafficserver.readthedocs.org/

Posted at 09:59AM Nov 20, 2013 by igalic in General  |  Comments [2]  | 

Custom logs and identifying remap rules

In a recent project we worked on, we needed to add a custom log which also had to identify which exactly remap rule triggered. I think this is probably a worthwhile feature to add to ATS (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TS-2181), but there's an easy way using existing plugins to accomplish this. Using (for example) the header_filter.so standard plugin, you can setup a config for each remap rule that you wish to identify.

    map http://www.example.com http://x.example.com @plugin=header_filter.so @pparam=id_a.config 

Where id_a.config contains simply

    [READ_REQUEST_HDR]
        @MapID =a_mapping= 

 In a custom log, you can then log this as

    %<{@MapID}cqh> 

Voila! The trick here is that headers with the @ prefix are considered internal to ATS, and are removed before sending to servers or User-Agents.

Posted at 07:03PM Sep 04, 2013 by zwoop in General  |  Comments [1]  | 

v4.0.1 is finally here!

The Apache Traffic Server community is extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of our next major release, v4.0.1! This is the culmination of a years worth of work on features and bug fixes. Some fun facts about this release:

• There are contributions from 59 individuals
• Over 1,300 commits
• 446 Jira tickets were closed

Posted at 08:20PM Aug 30, 2013 by zwoop in General  |  Comments [1]  | 

Apache Traffic Server v3.2.5 Released

The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Traffic Server project are pleased to announce the release of Apache Traffic Server v3.2.5.

This is primarily a maintenance release, fixing minor SSL issue, as well as some build issues to make our package maintainers lives easier. We encourage Traffic Server users to upgrade - and everybody else to try it out!

The source code is immediately available for download.

Posted at 04:01PM Jul 30, 2013 by jpeach in General  |  Comments [2]  | 

Squid binary log with unmapped URL

The Squid log format that we have by default in Traffic Server is a standard format that works well for proxies. It's also well supported by existing log analyzers etc. However, in some cases, where you map many domains to one origin server, the logs produced aren't particularly useful. Why? Because the default Squid log format logs the remapped URL, and not the original client URL. There is of course an easy way to fix this, using our custom log formats.

1. Disable the original Squid log format, and enable the custom logs.
2. Create the new Squid log format in logs_xml.config

CONFIG proxy.config.log.logging_enabled INT 3
CONFIG proxy.config.log.custom_logs_enabled INT 1
CONFIG proxy.config.log.squid_log_enabled INT 0 

<LogFormat>
  <Name = "squid_unmapped"/>
  <Format = "%<cqtq> %<ttms> %<chi> %<crc>/%<pssc> %<psql> %<cqhm> %<cquuc> %<caun> %<phr>/%<pqsn> %<psct> %<xid>"/>
</LogFormat>

<LogObject>
  <Format = "squid_unmapped"/>
  <Filename = "squid"/>
  <Mode = "binary"/>
</LogObject>

Posted at 06:20PM Jun 27, 2013 by zwoop in General  |  Comments [2]  | 

How Comcast built a CDN using Traffic Server

At the 2013 Content Delivery Summit, Jan van Doorn gave a really interesting talk about how Comcast built an open source content delivery network with Apache Traffic Server at its core. Both the video of the talk and the slides are online.

In the talk, Jan covers the major parts of the Comcast CDN: the cache, configuration management, content routing and utilization monitoring. This is a great overview for anyone who is interested in building a CDN. There's enough open source out there that this should be practical for almost any organization.

The static tiered caching support that Comcast developed for this project landed in the Traffic Server 3.3.4 release, so you can experiment with it today.

Posted at 03:57PM Jun 22, 2013 by jpeach in General  |  Comments [2]  | 

ATS v3.3.4 (developer) is released!

We've just finished the v3.3.4 release, and it's now available for immediate download. The announcement email is included below, but please take this out for a spin and make sure it's moving towards stability.

          Apache Traffic Server v3.3.4-dev Released

The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Traffic Server project are 
pleased to announce the release of Apache Traffic Server v3.3.4-dev. This is 
our latest development release, and is available from

    http://trafficserver.apache.org/downloads


This is primarily a bug release over v3.3.3-dev, with one major feature: The 
ability to assign disks to volumes, such that you can target content to 
specific drives (e.g. an SSD).


Please take this out for a spin, and file bugs and problem reports. We need 
everyone to keep testing these -dev releases, as we move towards our next 
stable release (v3.4). We are unfortunately 4-6 weeks behind right now, and 
looking for a v3.4 release by mid to end of July.


Sincerely,

-- The Apache Traffic Server community


 

Posted at 09:54AM Jun 12, 2013 by zwoop in Releases  |  Comments [3]  | 

BarCamp in Denver, July 9-10th

From the mailing lists announcements:

It's our pleasure to announce the next US Apache Traffic Server BarCamp! 
It will be held in downtown Denver, gracefully hosted by Comcast. It's a 
two day event, going all day from July 9th to July 10th. We will work on 
code, share experiences, come up with clever ideas, and help anyone who 
has questions or problems. This is a "DevOps" event, so even if you are 
not a hard-code C++ template wizard, you can participate (so I'm 
definitely going to be there).

Please RSVP to [email protected] before June 15th, we'll send more 
details with directions etc. once we have a better idea how many people 
are participating. A few of us living in Denver can help with 
accommodations  and travel to and from the airport as necessary.

Sincerely,

-- The Traffic Server PMC
 

Posted at 08:41AM May 25, 2013 by zwoop in General  |  Comments [1]  | 

Apache Traffic Server over 4% market share

Thanks to Go Daddy switching from IIS to Apache Traffic Server (good choice!) we're now at around 4.2% market share according to Netscraft's latest survey. We're combined with Apache in general, so we helped Apache gain one of the largest market share increases in recent history. The study is available at http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/05/03/may-2013-web-server-survey.html.

Posted at 08:54AM May 03, 2013 by zwoop in General  |  Comments [1]  |