Did anyone else notice the blue narwhals in the Staging and Testing areas? What's up with that?
Edit: D'oh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Narwhal (disappointed it's not an easter egg)
Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#72That just drives home how much simpler things have become with no SLA IaaS. Instead of spending 20+ hours racking an east coast/west coast pair of small cages or perhaps just 2 full racks each, you can save time and money by going with simple and glitch proof scale out systems driven by one button provisioning of hundreds of low performing vms. As an added bonus if your san or ethernet collapses you can safely sleep…
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the billions of dollars pumped into election campaigns, it's odd that a political party wouldn't keep at least a small team on the code to continually test, update, refactor, and generally improve the quality. Fred Brooks, nine women / one month, etc.
The problem is that political parties are fueled by donations, and it's hard to get people to donate for something like that. Not to mention you'd be competing with local/state/House/Senate elections with actual candidates for that fundraising money. I've donated politically in the past and even having only given small amounts, I still get emails daily and calls monthly asking me to donate to about half a dozen group…
The DNC does the job of folding any successful and reusable parts from the campaign into a continuing technology stack.
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#74Wish this had a legend. Obviously the box sizes and positioning mean something. What I can see makes me a bit curious. - Frontend Web boxes are "big", where the (some) of the backend App boxes are small. I'd have though it would be the reverse -- frontend horizontally scaled first, backend vertically scaled first. - Sometimes they use Zones ABC, sometimes AB. This is cool, but a lot of the "front" infrastructure is A…
I remember reading somewhere that they were using Akamai as their CDN provider (at least for their donation page).
Ask Scott why they ended up going with Akamai and how they, "reached out" to the campaign. Funny story.
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#75Did anyone else notice the blue narwhals in the Staging and Testing areas? What's up with that? Edit: D'oh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Narwhal (disappointed it's not an easter egg)
It is in a way. The department heads were very worried about the scrutiny and tone of the press in covering project narwhal and actively discouraged its use as a codename for the project.
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#76Is this complexity really necessary?
Ask Mitt Romney that question
Yes and no. This diagram lays out how to do this kind of thing cheaply and scale the systems up and down quickly. It allows the campaign to bring these systems and services "in house" instead of contracting 3rd parties to manage adding boxes at great expense at the last minute based on best guesses of expected traffic. It allows you to respond to the spikes in traffic that are expected during a campaign and during promotions that would otherwise bring your site down or have you paying for unused bandwidth.
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#77That just drives home how much simpler things have become with no SLA IaaS. Instead of spending 20+ hours racking an east coast/west coast pair of small cages or perhaps just 2 full racks each, you can save time and money by going with simple and glitch proof scale out systems driven by one button provisioning of hundreds of low performing vms. As an added bonus if your san or ethernet collapses you can safely sleep…
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
Perhaps that was a bit overly broad and not quite representative of what I meant to convey. The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing. Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care. Are you gonna tell them they can't have phones?
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#78That just drives home how much simpler things have become with no SLA IaaS. Instead of spending 20+ hours racking an east coast/west coast pair of small cages or perhaps just 2 full racks each, you can save time and money by going with simple and glitch proof scale out systems driven by one button provisioning of hundreds of low performing vms. As an added bonus if your san or ethernet collapses you can safely sleep…
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
Isn't "uses tech to facilitate the things that people do" what a tech startup does?
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also the same group that created Y Combinator, Hacker News, and the Internet. If you don't like it, you can see yourself out.
We created the Internet?
Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
Perhaps that was a bit overly broad and not quite representative of what I meant to convey. The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing. Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care. Are you gonna tell th…
> The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing.
I thought this was pretty obvious.
> Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care.
I have no idea what you're trying to convey here.