Ubuntu a Mooter for global advertising platform

Interestingly, all development and monitoring of Mooter's platform is done in Sydney but hosting is spread across four data centres around the world.

At each site Mooter runs two Xen hosts with several virtual machines running a number of applications like a site central, DNS, Puppet server, and load balancer.

"If a Xen machine goes down we can rebuild another in 20 minutes," Hetherington said. "When you are looking to provide redundancy don't over-engineer it. With load balancing you can't be down for 30 mins so we used Ultra Monkey."

At the other end of each cluster is a data warehouse which extracts data from each machine and "this architecture easily satisfies our business requirements".

While the company would rather serve all its subscribers out of one site, "the great firewall of China" makes ad serving out of China too slow so it had to do its own hosting there.

For monitoring, Mooter uses Nagios to perform 600 checks every five minutes, and has extended it to monitor business metrics like how many failures there are from suppliers for ads.

Other open source tools used for the business include language processing and Pentaho for reporting and BI.

While Mooter has achieved success and innovation on top of open source software, Hetherington is adamant he's not religious about software and "just wants it to work".

"We still need to run a business and it is more efficient to run a business in a Windows environment than Linux, even if it's just saving on training, that's just a basic reality unfortunately," he said. "If you are running a business you will want to support Windows and get a supplier that can support both because if you have Windows and Linux they will always blame each other."

Solutions First senior developer Matt Palmer said the Mooter story is a good example of the "pure flexibility" of using open source software.

"We've been able to glue together various disparate pieces of software in ways nobody envisaged you would be able to do," Palmer said. "The nice thing about open source is if it is not already there you can add it later. With proprietary software you are forced into begging to the vendor or switching horses mid-stream which is disruptive to the business."

Palmer said a number of improvements to Puppet were made and contributed back to the open source code base with Mooter's permission.