Surf Life Saving Aussies Event 2016 Chooses Nano Solutions

An Iconic Event

The Surf Life Saving Championships, or Aussies, are the highpoint of Surf Life Saving Australia’s (SLS) sporting year. SLS is Australia’s principal water rescue authority. Combining volunteer and professional members, they are also responsible for water safety training and awareness campaigns across Australia.

SLS has been in operation for over 100 years and, of the many sporting event that it organises, the Aussies are by far the biggest, as well as being a key part of its long heritage – they celebrated their 100-year anniversary in 2015.

Taking place annually on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, the Aussies bring together thousands of competitors competing in a wide range of events. The Aussies are open to members of SLS and individuals from community, and, since the introduction of the Youth Championships, they now also welcome entrants for under 14s and under 15s events.

This year’s Aussies were held in April at North Kirra Beach. They attracted a phenomenal number of people, boasting around 7000 competitors and over 10,000 spectators.

SLS event took the step of live-streaming the event in response to strong demand for more coverage. The Aussies’ nine-day program of events is extensive, but the most popular attractions include the Ironman/Ironwoman, rescue and resuscitation, Taplin relay, beach sprint, beach flags and surf boat events.

This year’s Aussies also saw the inauguration of the Aussie Ocean Swim, in celebration of the event’s centenary – competitors had the pleasure of swimming the 2.5 kilometer course to the North Kirra Beach from Tweed Heads.

The Software Challenge!

The scale of participation and interest in the Aussies presents a number of technical challenges. Key to SLS was keeping its huge following in the loop by being able to quickly and accurately report the results of the competition. The results also needed to be easily accessible across the range of internet devices.

How Nano Solutions Are Involved

SLS turned to the professionals at Nano Solutions to meet their technical needs. Nano Solutions assessed the challenge and provided the necessary infrastructure and service to ensure that the world could follow this year’s Aussies without a hitch. Key elements of the Nano Solutions service included:

Building the web application that visualises all of the results data.
Writing a connector that imports data from various systems into results.sls.com.au every 2 minutes.
Managing the server infrastructure and the server itself.
Managing monitoring and scaling.
Managing the integration between sls.com.au and resutls.sls.com.au via API and Widget.

The Technical Approach

Delivering real-time results for an event of this scale required careful architectural decisions. The system needed to handle thousands of concurrent users refreshing results pages throughout each day of competition, with data flowing in from multiple timing and scoring systems on the beach.

Our team built a custom data connector that polled the upstream scoring systems every two minutes, normalised the data into a consistent format, and pushed it into our results platform. The web application itself was designed to be lightweight and responsive, ensuring fast load times on mobile devices — critical given that most spectators were checking results on their phones from the beach.

On the infrastructure side, we managed the hosting environment with proactive monitoring and auto-scaling to handle traffic spikes. When a popular event like the Ironman final was underway, traffic would surge dramatically. Our infrastructure responded automatically, scaling server capacity up during peak periods and back down during quieter times, keeping costs manageable while maintaining performance.

The API and widget integration with the main SLS website (sls.com.au) meant that results were available not only on the dedicated results site but also embedded directly into the organisation’s primary web presence. This avoided the need for users to navigate between different sites and ensured a consistent experience.

Lessons for Event Technology

Working with SLS on the Aussies reinforced several principles that we apply to all our event technology projects:

Reliability is non-negotiable. When thousands of competitors, coaches, and spectators are relying on your platform for real-time information, downtime is not an option. Redundancy, monitoring, and automated failover are essential.
Mobile-first design matters. At a beach event, the overwhelming majority of users are on mobile devices. Every design and performance decision must prioritise the mobile experience.
Data integration is the hardest part. The technical challenge is rarely the front-end display — it is reliably ingesting, transforming, and delivering data from upstream systems that may not have been designed for real-time consumption.

Can Be Applied To Other Events

The success of Nano Solutions’ collaboration with SLS and the Aussies speaks for itself. The infrastructure and service provided by us can be deployed for a range of circumstances — from sporting competitions and conferences to corporate events and live broadcasts.

Our experienced team can apply innovative approaches to events of every type and size, as well as other instances in which information needs to be disseminated quickly and accurately across a range of platforms. Whether you need a real-time results platform, a live event dashboard, or a custom data integration between multiple systems, the principles and technology are the same.

Whatever the scale of your project or the specifics of its challenges, you’ll be safe in the hands of Nano Solutions.