Olympics 2012 leans heavily on open source

A news clip from a recent article in Computerworld by Bernard Golden.  Russ Ede, who is responsible for the London 2012 Olympics website, shared "some amazing information about what it takes to create a website that can stand up to the most widely watched sports event in the world."

First, you have to remember that there's no do-over with these kind of events. Everything simply has to work when the games go off-delays or postponements are unthinkable. So what goes into creating a website capable of supporting the Olympics?

Perhaps most surprising, there's no massive server farm. The actual processing taking place on the website is relatively small. However, there is massive use of the Akamai CDN to distribute content around the world. The Olympics website has been using live video to transmit the progress of the Olympic torch and has contracted with Akamai to distribute it.

Another surprising thing about the London 2012 Olympics website is that it leverages open source extensively, using LAMP as the primary software foundation. Despite the demands placed on the site, there's an apparent ethos of running "cheap and cheerful," which precludes use of expensive proprietary software packages.