Yahoo! SVP Shelton Shugar formalized the company's announcement of its open-source Traffic Server during his keynote speech at the 4th International Cloud Computing Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley.

His speech featured a tech-heavy description of how the company is already deploying cloud computing internally, and the benefits it has achieved to date.

"The bottom-line: it's worth it," Shugar said. "We're already getting huge benefits from this.

Shugar noted that Yahoo! has acquired numerous products over the years, in addition to developing its own, all of which were already designed "right down to the metal," making it difficult to integrate them. "Now, we want to build out horizontally," he noted.

Yahoo! is, of course, has one of the larger IT installations you will find: 600 million unique website visitors each month worldwide, 300 million email addresses, and "hundreds of petabytes of data," Shugar said. So now, "we are building a private cloud to be used within Yahoo!, have developed services and deployed them in data centers all over the world. There are hundreds of applications and products that we've migrated to exist on top of the cloud."

Shugar also noted that Traffic Server is just the latest in the company's open-source initiatives. It has previously open-sourced Hadoop, and also works with HP, Intel, the National Science Foundation, and several universities in the Open Cirrus project.

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