Announcing Grove: A Golang HTTP Caching Proxy for Traffic Control

[Robert Butts <ro...@apache.org>]

We are happy to announce Grove: A new Golang HTTP Caching Proxy for Traffic
Control.

Grove was announced at the 2018 Apache Traffic Control Spring Summit. This
new proxy integrates with Traffic Control and works alongside Apache
Traffic Server (ATS). The primary goal is to enable faster development
iteration, especially for linear traffic, with a smaller codebase in a
higher-level language.

Features:
* Go (Golang)
* 6000 lines of code
* RFC 7234 Compliant (HTTP Caching)
* Compile-time plugin system
* High performance, tested to saturate 20Gbps
* LRU memory cache
* Prototype (untested) disk cache
* On-the-fly config reloading
* ATS-Compatible cache keys
* ATS-Compatible parent consistent hashing
* RPM
* Dockerfile
* Traffic Control Config Generator, a la ORT

It has a robust, high-performance plugin system, designed to enable
independent rapid development without boundlessly growing the primary
application. If you have specific use cases, you're encouraged to write
plugins, and where generic, submit them back to Traffic Control for
inclusion in the project.

Again, the primary goals are fast iteration and linear traffic. As such,
it's primarily useful for linear or other similar memory-cached traffic.
There exists a prototype disk cache, but it's currently untested.

Grove supplements ATS, it doesn't replace it. It is not a goal to replace
ATS, or to cease support for ATS. In fact, making Traffic Control more
cache-agnostic continues to be a goal, and Grove achieves this by purely
using the APIs to generate configuration, with no native or custom support
in Traffic Control.

Grove is now available in Traffic Control on Github:

https://github.com/apache/incubator-trafficcontrol/tree/master/grove

Instructions for writing plugins are here:

https://github.com/apache/incubator-trafficcontrol/tree/master/grove/plugin

Grove will be in the next release of Traffic Control, 2.3.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me (I'm the primary
developer of Grove), or this mailing list.