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Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

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Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#61

Post by miles932 »

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…

Box sizes: this system supported lots of different programming languages/framewoerks/pre-built OSS, and as a result, some parts ran nice and lean (python) others chewed memory with reckless abandon (magento). Another factor was supplying enough network bandwidth to some hosts, hence larger sizes.

Zones: most apps were built for 2 AZ's at the start; apps deemed "critical" and "doable" flipped to 3 near the election.

Asgard: deployments had been tested with Asgard in East, but the rapid deploy in west actually used this approach. Thanks Netflix!

Services: some which are critical but missed the chart are IAM, sns, cloudwatch (for autoscaling), and yes, a bit of cloudfront was used on images sent out on SES (transactional only!) emails.

Thanks for the good questions!

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#62

Post by miles932 »

mratzloff wrote: post #37

The most surprising thing about this is that test and staging are 1:1 duplicates of production. At the companies I've worked at dealing in scale, that has never been the case. "Oh, you run 10 servers and 2 load balancers across these 2 sub-systems? Here's 2 servers and a toy whistle for staging." But then again, I suppose that's what you get when you can dump hundreds of millions of dollars on a problem over a couple…

Ok, a few of the boxes were smaller, but basically yes, running staging and test took big advantage of pay only for what you use..

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#63

Post by miles932 »

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]

In total, it's nearly 200 apps!

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#64

Post by ZachPruckowski »

charlieok wrote: post #58
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a talk by Rayid Ghani, the chief scientist for the Obama campaign. He said that they shut down everything after the campaign simply because they can't afford to keep on all the staff full-time for the 4 years, but they don't throw away the code.

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 groups (many of which I've never donated to). Heck, wounded firefighters and cancer-striken kids have a low conversion rate for their fundraising - "money for technical systems to help a candidate to be named later" is even worse.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#65

Post by miles932 »

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…

This is sized during the last few days; prior to that definitely smaller scale (same groups, fewer nodes)

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#69

Post by patrickg »

Serious question: does the 3d mode add any information? I am distracted by it but perhaps the size of the blocks have any attached meaning? Is there a 2d variant available?

Otherwise: very interesting to see such a large infrastructure used for the campaign. I wonder how it compares to an average campaign here in Germany. I'd assume only a 10th of the servers (while spending the same amount of money :)) used here. I can't see anything special on the web before elections other than some wordpress alike web servers.

Re: Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram

#70

Post by trotsky »

That 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 through the pager - somebody else will undoubtedly post the problem on their well monitored support forum.

Let's not forget the capEx advantage - It's not like the Obama organization can afford heavy five or low six figure expenditures on infrastructure when who even knows if they'll be able to raise a series A or will even be around in a year.

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