Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram • Hacker News Board

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#21

Post by minimax » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 3:09 AM UTC

Harper Reed and Scott VanDenPlas did a talk / Q&A at the Chicago AWS meetup group a few months ago. My hazy recollection of the salient points of the talk:

1) This represents a heterogenous set of services where the engineers in charge of each service were more-or-less free to use whatever technology stack they were most comfortable with.

2) Use puppet for provisioning everything. (There is some subtlety Scott went into about being able to bring up a bunch of servers quickly which I have since forgotten).

3) Everything shuts down the day after the election. Not much time spent future-proofing the code when it has a well known expiration date.

4) Testing testing testing. System had serious problems and 2008 and they didn't want to repeat in 2012.

5) Engineers and sysadmins had a lot of latitude to make changes in order to respond to issues as they developed. It sounded like this is essentially Harper Reed's management style (he seems like a cool guy to work for).

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#22

Post by sc00ter » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 3:45 AM UTC

cmelbye wrote: post #20

sc00ter wrote: post #12

Your tax dollars at works.

Please tell me that you weren't educated in the United States. I can't understand how else someone could misunderstand such a fundamental concept of our election process.

Ah, yes, because somehow wasting all that money on an election campaign is okay so long as it is voluntary taxation. Then I remember that this is the same group of intellectuals that voted up "Star Trek-like computer with voice interface" (a 15 line mashup that is neither a computer, nor Star Trek-like) to the top of HN. God bless America.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#23

Post by quellhorst » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 3:49 AM UTC

This would be much easier to read if the entire thing wasn't slanted.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#24

Post by wilg » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 3:50 AM UTC

sc00ter wrote: post #22

cmelbye wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me that you weren't educated in the United States. I can't understand how else someone could misunderstand such a fundamental concept of our election process.

Ah, yes, because somehow wasting all that money on an election campaign is okay so long as it is voluntary taxation. Then I remember that this is the same group of intellectuals that voted up "Star Trek-like computer with voice interface" (a 15 line mashup that is neither a computer, nor Star Trek-like) to the top of HN. God bless America.

Do you actually think this is how taxes work?

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#25

Post by dahumpty » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 3:55 AM UTC

Its interesting to note that the the boweb-production servers of "www" don't have read-replicas (asynchronous replication) for read scalability. Anyone know why? Typically, one would use read-replicas to alleviate read workloads on the master.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#26

Post by gee_totes » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 4:02 AM UTC

sc00ter wrote: post #12

Your tax dollars at works.

This comment fails on many levels. Here is another:

If this was our tax dollars at work[0], I would say it's a good investment since it worked and got Obama elected. By contrast, Romney's online infrastructure (ORCA), which in the context of this comment can be interpreted a non-tax dollars (i.e. private money) crashed on election day, and Romney did not get elected.

I would rather have my tax dollars spent on something that works than have something privately funded that doesn't work.

[0] which it's totally not, the campaign was entirely funded by matching donations and Obama did not participate in the federal election money scheme.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#27

Post by barkerja » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

sc00ter wrote: post #12

Your tax dollars at works.

If by tax dollars you mean the money that I willfully donated to President Obama's campaign; then by all means, yes, my “tax dollars.”

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#28

Post by WestCoastJustin » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 4:09 AM UTC

Here is a chat from AWS Invent BDT 207: Big Data and the US Presidential Campaign [1]. Really interesting. They cover the diagram too.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#29

Post by ahoy » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 4:21 AM UTC

sc00ter wrote: post #12

Your tax dollars at works.

Campaigns in America aren't publicly funded (that is, they aren't funded by tax money). The money to build this and to run the rest of Obama's campaign was raised by the campaign itself.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#30

Post by volkadav » Sun, Apr 14, 2013, 4:25 AM UTC

DigitalSea wrote: post #17

Who would have thought the infrastructure behind Obama's site and whatever else they're running was so big. I always assumed it would be running maybe one or two instances, not require a whole freakin' diagram to explain.

As pointed out down-thread, there's a lot more to this than a simple website (voter analytics/GOTV stuff just for starters), and the potential user base/traffic load is enormous (ramping up particularly as you near election day).

Just as a data point in support of the kind of traffic that US presidential elections can drive for election-related things, I happened to be working on the web team for a major American newspaper circa the '08 election and we saw something like 1.2Bn page views the month leading up the election. (Traffic analytics wasn't my team, so that's a vague memory of being told that from five years ago. Grain of salt, etc.) This is for simple news/op-ed, mind you, and only one source of many for that information. I have no problems believing that the main web presences of the two candidates would see even more traffic, and they'd likely be more complicated under the hood than "hit homepage, follow article link, read article."