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Scaling the BBC iPlayer to handle demand
- retube 16y agoIt's tremendous that (as far as I can tell) this has all been architected and developed internally at the BBC. So refreshing in the current climate of public entities outsourcing everything. Much better value for money - and more to the point demonstrates that complex projects can be successfully completed internally.
- kierank 16y agoThe generation/serving of the pages is a triviality compared to the delivery of the video. In the past the BBC used to serve all video in house but now they just use the "big three" CDN providers.
- bendtheblock 16y agoI think some of the infrastructure maintenance (and maybe general development too) is outsourced. About a year ago I was on a service management training course in London along with some Siemens staff who were working on the iPlayer project.
- retube 16y agoAh yes of course Siemens. They who provided the BBC's £2bn phone network - which apparently barely functions.
- kiujygtyujik 16y agoSiemens took over the BBC's R+D depts as part of the outsourcing deal which means they now run pretty much all the technical services. BBC outsources to Siemens, This includes handing over all it's unique skills Siemens, then bills the BBC for stuff it already knew how to do. Management demonstrates with many Powerpoints how this is saving everybody money.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- flipbrad 16y agoWhen I worked a summer in a management consultancy we produced powerpoints for the BBC showing that it was a waste of money. but don't let that trouble you.
- bruceboughton 16y agoI'd be interested to hear why they chose PHP. (It's not exactly the framework-du-jour, so they must have positively chosen it). Also, it seems to me that the web page serving would be the most trivial part of iPlayer. Scaling the video and recommendation database is probably a more interesting topic.
- points 16y agoShocking to hear that someone has chosen a tool based on its merits rather than how fashionable it is...
- poundy 16y agoExactly the way I felt!
- bruceboughton 16y agoIndeed. That's why I was asking for what reasons they chose PHP, i.e. what do they perceive it's merits to be.
- earnubs 16y agoOne reason might be the ability to hire quality developers in sufficient numbers. The BBC is big, with developers (both internal BBC and external contracts) working all over the UK on a wide range of output.
- bl4k 16y agoand any good developer can pick up and be proficient in PHP quickly
- poundy 16y agowhich is in my opinion PHP's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Weakness because not-so-good developers think they are good while writing code using register globals, no input validation, no escaping output, etc..
- jobeirne 16y agoEww. Excel graphs.
- akadien 16y agoI'm thankful that they shared their analysis. Does it really detract from their work that they used Excel to graph it?
- rquirk 16y agoIronic that this returned the following error when I tried to read it: "Error 500 - Internal Error. This might be because: We are experiencing abnormal traffic to our network." :-)