Around the world
Learn why we transitioned the MediaWiki platform to serve traffic from multiple data centers, and the challenges we faced along the way. Wikimedia Foundation provides access to information for people around the globe. When you visit Wikipedia , your browser sends a web request to our servers and receives a response. Our servers are located in multiple geographically separate datacenters . This ...
When the Foundation finally got server space in a proper data center, it was on the 13th floor of the Verizon building in downtown Tampa, Florida. The original servers were still running alongside the first 300 or so machines around the time of the ARIN registration and first audit.
Wikipedia Is Running On Its Own Metal
While much of the world has embraced " the cloud", and there are indeed many advantages to it, Wikipedia and its sister projects—including Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata—take a decidedly different approach. The Wikimedia Foundation operates its own data centers, running thousands of servers across multiple facilities around the globe.
This setup allows us to remain independent, while delivering a reliable experience for users around the world . The SRE team oversees a global network of datacenters , seven in total, spanning the United States, Singapore, the Netherlands, France, and, most recently, Brazil.
Useful Notes on Around The World How Wikipedia Became A Multi Datacenter Deployment
Multi -DC MediaWiki (also known as , Active-active MediaWiki) is a cross-cutting project driven by the Performance Team to give MediaWiki the ability to serve read requests from multiple datacenters . Historically, Wikimedia Foundation served requests to MediaWiki from its primary datacenter only, where the secondary data center was effectively a cold stand-by exclusively for disaster recovery ...
The backend web and database servers are in Ashburn, with Carrollton originally planned to handle emergency fallback. Carrollton was chosen for this as a result of the 2013 Datacenter RfC. At EvoSwitch, we have a Varnish cache cluster and several miscellaneous servers. The Kennisnet location is now used only for network access and routing. Ashburn (eqiad) became the primary data center in ...
Wikimedia servers
Ashburn (eqiad) became the primary data center in January 2013, taking over from Tampa (pmtpa and sdtpa) which had been the main data centre since 2004. Around April 2014, sdtpa (Equinix - formerly Switch and Data - in Tampa, Florida, provided networking for pmtpa) was shut down, followed by pmtpa (Hostway - formerly PowerMedium - in ...
It is the latest to open among the Wikimedia Foundation's seven data centers across the world and is the first center in South America. As a result of the new center, the average time it takes a reader in Brazil to load Wikipedia dropped by one-third of a second.
Wikimedia infrastructure
Data center diagram by Timo Tijhof (CC-BY 3.0), based on World map by Skimel (Public domain). » Data centers » MediaWiki at WMF » Memcached use by MediaWiki MediaWiki infrastructure WMF Infrastructure overview » Performance Team infrastructure » Networking topology HTTP Caching (traffic flow from cache PoPs) Event Platform Data Platform ...
