How Cloud Computing Helped Obama Win the Presidential Election

Jeff Barr, a web services evangelist at Amazon.com has written an interesting blog post on how Amazon’s cloud helped Barack Obama win the election. In the post Barr says “imagine setting up the technology infrastructure needed to power a dynamic, billion-dollar organization under strict time limits using volunteer labor, with traffic peaking for just one day, and then shutting everything down shortly thereafter. The words “mission critical” definitely apply here. With the opportunity to lead the United States as the prize, the stakes were high.”

He goes on to outline how “the campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars. Along the way they built and ran more than 200 applications on AWS, scaled to support millions of users. One of these apps, the campaign call tool, supported 7,000 concurrent users and placed over two million calls on the last four days of the campaign. Here’s a graph which depicts the growth in call volume in the days leading up to the election.”…