There sure was plenty of tech involved in Obama’s election campaign — including millions of virtual elections that were used to predict the future — but until now the team behind it has gone uncelebrated.
Fortunately, Ars Technica has a wonderful feature about Obama’s secret weapon: Team Tech. To whet your appetite:
The reelection of Barack Obama was won by people, not by software. But [the]… edge was provided by the work of a group of people unique in the history of presidential politics: Team Tech, a dedicated internal team of technology professionals who operated like an Internet startup, leveraging a combination of open source software, Web services, and cloud computing power.
They faced a weighty task — as one tweet, from Scott VanDenPlas, the head of the Obama’s DevOps group, put it “4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2000 nodes, three data centers, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President” — but it didn’t phase them.
Instead, they achieved the seemingly impossible: a behemoth of computational grunt that suffered just 30 minutes of downtime during the entire election campaign. Of course, tech didn’t win the presidentship — but it went a long way in helping. You should read the whole report over at Ars Technica. It’s inspirational stuff. [Ars Technica]
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