Yahoo to open source its "cloud serving platform" in 2011
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 13 May 2010, 18:42 IST
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Bangalore: Yahoo intends to open source its internal "cloud serving" platform which is in a halfway between Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Google's App Engine by next year. The company already uses the open source Hadoop for distributed number crunching - this is used to build its search webmap, among so many other tasks - and last June, it released its very own Hadoop distro. Then, in November, it released its Traffic Server, which handles edge caching, edge processing, and load balancing, while also managing traffic on the company's storage and server-virtualization services, reports Cade Metz from The Register. The company says its current plan is to open source the platform early in 2011. And eventually, it will open source all its back-end platforms. It provides the company's internal developers with on-demand access to computing resources. But rather than offering raw virtual machines as Amazon EC2 does, it spins up "containers" of server power that are pre-configured for things like load-balancing and security. That way, developers needn't handle the load-balancing on their own. Google App Engine goes much further than handling the fundamentals like it can hide even more of the underlying infrastructure, and it puts tight restrictions on the design of applications so they'll conform to this infrastructure. It restricts what languages you use and limits the libraries you can choose from. It even prevents you from making system requests that take more than 30 seconds or return more than 10MB of data. Amazon's EC2 is also closed, but using its APIs the open source Eucalyptus project has mimicked its setup for those looking to operate their own internal clouds. It's bundled with Ubuntu server, and it's the basis for the new federal government Nebula cloud that's under construction at NASA.