Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by scottvdp on Sunday April 14, 2013 @11:22PM
(#5549566)
The subtlety you are referring to in #2 is that we moved from puppet for deployments to puppet to configure template nodes. We baked AMIs from those template nodes and deployed those, drastically shortening our time from boot to serving traffic.
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by miles932 on Monday April 15, 2013 @01:58PM
(#5552989)
hugs
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by ROFISH on Sunday April 14, 2013 @01:35AM
(#5546020)
Kinda odd saying that it has an expiration date. Aren't the same systems required for the next election?
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by zaptheimpaler on Sunday April 14, 2013 @05:31AM
(#5546444)
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.
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by charlieok on Sunday April 14, 2013 @10:56AM
(#5547027)
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.
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by ZachPruckowski on Sunday April 14, 2013 @12:03PM
(#5547209)
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
by saraid216 on Sunday April 14, 2013 @02:34PM
(#5547711)
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
by bonertruck on Sunday April 14, 2013 @01:34PM
(#5547484)
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
by thatthatis on Sunday April 14, 2013 @11:50AM
(#5547173)
They keep a small team, just not the full battalion.
Source: visit to OFA offices in 2010. May have changed by now because there is no third term, but I doubt it.
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by dsl on Sunday April 14, 2013 @02:53AM
(#5546167)
Obama For America, Inc. is an actual not for profit corporation[1], and will likely be wound down before the next election. The long term election-to-election databases and such are all ran by the DNC Services Corporation.
1. http://www.corporationwiki.com/Illinois/Chicago/obama-for-am...
Re:Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram
by harper on Sunday April 14, 2013 @06:29PM
(#5548651)
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.
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).