Case Study: Wikimedia Foundation achieves scalable, reliable open-source infrastructure for Wikipedia with Ubuntu

Wikimedia chooses Ubuntu for all of its servers

Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia is a global, contributor‑driven encyclopedia with millions of articles, hundreds of thousands of editors and very high traffic. The organization needed to keep a major website running reliably and affordably with a small operations team, standardize its server platform, and have predictable, manageable updates and security support.

Wikimedia began migrating to Ubuntu (starting with 6.06 LTS in 2006 and later 8.04), running a custom LAMP stack on roughly 350 servers across three data centers and using Ubuntu packages and configuration management. The move gave them the predictable updates, security patches and vendor backing they needed; the result is a stable, scalable open‑source infrastructure that handles traffic spikes (peaking around 50,000 requests/second), supports their contributor model, and serves as a strong endorsement of Ubuntu for enterprise deployments.

Wikimedia Foundation

Brion Vibber