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Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

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Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#81

Post by saraid216 »

ZachPruckowski wrote: post #64
charlieok wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

This will seem a bit OT, but it is relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

I'm bothered that we as a society have trouble recognizing the point and purpose of overhead.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#82

Post by bonertruck »

saraid216 wrote: post #80
bonertruck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is an existing fundraising infrastructure, an existing polling infrastructure, an existing media market infrastructure, all of these are highly successful and competitive and get candidates elected. When you're introducing sprawling new web based architectures into this mix you've got to prove the efficacy of every minute decision and improvement. There is very little trust.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#84

Post by miles932 »

Ogre wrote: post #38
gulfie wrote: post #2

Where did this lovely map come from and how can I generate my own?

I tried to figure out what software this was from, but I gave up. I did find that Wikipedia has a nice list of network diagram software here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_diagram_s... I'd love to describe a network in (something like) graphviz dot notation and get a diagram that looks like this out the other end. Usually I wind up just using Visio and doing it by hand because work pays for it any…

It's good 'ol Inkscape :)

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#85

Post by spudlyo »

skyebook wrote: post #54
georgecalm wrote: post #31

It's interesting that apart from the DynamoDB and the SQL Warehouse (Redshaft?) there's a pretty large LevelDB instance serving the sites/services. I also wonder if in reality there were only one or two instances in each zone for each site behind the ELBs and the others were added to show how scalable the infrastructure is; or if their number actually did correspond to the avg. number of instances they ended up havin…

My guess is that they wouldn't have used Redshift as it only became available for beta a few weeks before the election.

They used Vertica, which they didn't seem to be too pleased about. I think they would have liked to use Redshift it was available.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#86

Post by JulianMorrison »

lifeformed wrote: post #8

Man, I didn't realize big sites were this complex under the hood. That site wasn't even complicated; if I recall correctly it was just some info pages and payment. I don't know anything about backend stuff. All my projects are like this: [traffic] -> [hosted server] -> [Amazon CloudFront files]

I am sure that was deliberate design. They want the common case to be as frictionless as possible.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#87

Post by ceejayoz »

dahumpty wrote: post #25

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.

Most likely the www servers are serving almost entirely static, cached content. Hell, they might not actually see any actual public traffic - they might just serve as CDN origins.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#88

Post by harper »

ROFISH wrote: post #40
minimax wrote: post #21

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 i…

Kinda odd saying that it has an expiration date. Aren't the same systems required for the next election?

The same systems are not used for the next election. Bitrot, differing requirements and a general distrust of technology all account for the political machine to rebuild each cycle.

This is obviously not ideal. I hope that OFA 4.0 will release a bunch of it as open source and it will help make the next cycle easier.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#89

Post by harper »

pfg wrote: post #47
jwilliams wrote: post #33

Wish 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).

We used a lot of Akamai. For all user facing services.
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