How Team Obama's Tech Efficiency Left Romney It In Dust

[Spartan]

Despite running a campaign with about twice the money and twice the staff of Governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid, President Barack Obama's campaign under-spent Romney's on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team. Based on an Ars analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll.

The bottom line is that the Obama campaign's emphasis on people over capital and use of open-source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money. As Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America put it in an e-mail interview with Ars, "A lesson which we took to heart from 2008 [was that] operational efficiency is an enormous strategic advantage."
As we revealed in our recent analysis of the Romney team's tech strategy, the Romney campaign spent $23.6 million on outside technology services—most of it on outside "digital media" consulting and data management. It outsourced most of its basic IT operations, while the Obama campaign did the opposite—buying hardware and software licenses, and hiring its own IT department. Just how much emphasis the Obama campaign put on IT is demonstrated by the fact that the campaign's most highly paid staff member was its Chief Integration and Innovation Officer, Michael Slaby, with an annualized salary of about $130,000.
By comparison, Kevin Rekowski, the Romney campaign's Director of Technology, was barely in the top 20 salaries of the Romney campaign, with an annualized salary of $80,000. Zac Moffatt, Romney's Digital Director —a social media planner, not a technology expert—was number five, at $175,000 a year, in addition to whatever he earned from hiring his own firm, Targeted Victory, to handle much of the Romney campaign's digital strategy.

But the advantage of having a personal army of coders wasn't just financial. "Campaigns are serious tests of your creativity and foresight," VanDenPlas explained. "They are unpredictable, agile, and short—an 18 month, $1 billion, essentially disposable organization. Hackers can thrive in an environment like that, to a point where I'm not sure anyone else really can. Everything is over far too quickly to get boring."
[b] Smart, not perfect[/b]

The strategy the Obama campaign's DevOps team used to manage the ever-growing number of applications deployed by the campaign was to "choose the lowest cost route to get us the most results—basically, be smart, not perfect," VanDenPlas said. "We did a lot of work to make things simple, and when you have a team that is unfazed by limitations, you get some really amazing and creative solutions, some of which I hope to see come out as open sourced projects here shortly."

Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign's IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linux—particularly Ubuntu—was used as the server operating system of choice. "We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose," VanDenPlas said. "Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js."

It also helped that the campaign, at least for internally developed applications, relied almost exclusively on Amazon Web Service for its infrastructure, eliminating a lot of the financial burden of infrastructure management. "For the applications built by the OFA [Obama for America] technology team, 99.999 percent were AWS hosted," VanDenPlas said, "purely because it was the best fit for what we were doing. As a whole, if you include privately hosted virtualized environments in the cloud architecture definition, I believe everything was 'cloud,' even down to our development environments running inside of Vagrant on our laptops."
The system configurations for the campaign's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances were created using the [url="http://puppetlabs.com/"]Puppet[/url] configuration management tool and were built as Debian packages kept in the campaign's own Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) repository—both for internally developed and third-party applications. As the number of applications and the scale of the campaign's AWS infrastructure use climbed, the DevOps team shifted to using [url="http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/06/asgard-web-based-cloud-management-and.html"]Asgard[/url]—an open-source tool developed by Netflix to manage cloud deployments.

To help optimize applications, the OFA technology team used [url="http://newrelic.com"]New Relic[/url], a tool also used by the Romney campaign. "It is really a fantastic tool that increases your visibility into where your applications are spending time," VanDenPlas said. "They support the major languages we used (Python, Ruby, PHP) as well as the frameworks (Flask, Rails, Kohana)."

While AWS's tools were used for performance monitoring and to trigger automatic scaling-up of capacity, VanDenPlas said, much of the monitoring was handled by a suite of commercial and open source tools and home-grown code, "consisting of [url="http://www.cacti.net/"]Cacti[/url], [url="http://www.opsview.com/"]Opsview[/url], [url="https://github.com/etsy/statsd#readme"]StatsD[/url], [url="http://graphite.wikidot.com"]Graphite[/url], and [url="https://github.com/scobal/seyren#readme"]Seyren[/url], and a number of custom applications that continued to evolve right up until Election Day," VanDenPlas said.
To get better aggregated alerting and metric data, the team built a lightweight plugin for Nagios (the open-source basis of Opsview) in Python based on [url="https://github.com/boto/boto#readme"]boto[/url] (the Python programming interface to AWS's services) and [url="https://www.dotcloud.com/"]dotCloud[/url]'s [url="https://github.com/dotcloud/zerorpc-python"]ZeroRPC[/url] messaging interface. "Using this," VanDenPlas explained, "we could constantly query thousands of nodes for near real-time statistics and feed them right back into the same alerting and monitoring system (Nagios) we used elsewhere."

Other performance monitoring and user experience data was collected using [url="http://chartbeat.com"]Chartbeat[/url] and Google Analytics. "Akamai also provided very useful statistics and logging," VanDenPlas said, "but these were mostly contextual rather than actionable." But, he added, the most heavily used monitoring system was "our community of internal and external supporters. The human factor in monitoring is huge. There are countless incidents where (OFA User Support Director) Brady Kriss notified us of pending problems derived from community help tickets."
[b] The armor-plated cloud[/b]

The OFA engineering team also did a lot of work to ensure that they got the most out of Amazon's cloud architecture in terms of resiliency. As the election approached and the infrastructure demands surged, the engineering team took advantage of Amazon's multiple availability zones within its Virgina data center. "We built out a triply redundant, encrypted, and compressed WAN optimized tunnel between AWS regions," VanDenPlas said, "using a combination of OpenVPN, CloudOptimizer, and some DNS trickery."

The team shifted its domain name service to [url="http://aws.amazon.com/route53/"]Amazon's Route 53[/url] service, which uses latency-based routing to direct users to the host running in the AWS availability region with the shortest network trip time. That allowed the Obama team's application deployments to use "regionless" generic configuration settings, making deployments much simpler.
The centerpiece of the whole Obama campaign was its fundraising capabilities, without which all of the other applications may have been moot. The 2012 campaign's online donation system was a complete rebuild from the 2008 effort, VanDenPlas said, "a multi-region, geolocated, three facility processor capable of a per second transaction count sufficiently high enough that we failed to be able to reach it in load testing. It could also operate if every other dependent service had failed, including its own database and every vendor."

The Obama campaign's websites were also hosted on Amazon and hardened. The campaign's engineers built an application that created static HTML snapshots of the sites stored in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3); in the event of a Web server failure, requests would be instantly directed to the latest snapshot.

All of that redundancy was given an extra workout in the week before the election as Hurricane Sandy approached the East Coast. VanDenPlas said that a "complete hot replica of our entire infrastructure" was deployed to Amazon's primary West Coast data center in under 24 hours as a precaution.
[b] Build, borrow, or buy[/b]

The tech team wasn't the only internal IT operation at Obama for America. The campaign ran its own data analysis shop and had its own army of Web designers and administrators. And with a payroll of over 1,000 people, the IT team had a lot of tech to support for an organization that had essentially a 24-month lifecycle.

That meant buying a lot of hardware and software. [url="http://www.cdw.com/"]CDW[/url], based outside of Chicago, was the go-to supplier for much of the campaign's computer equipment and boxed software purchases. Microsoft also sold $522,210 worth of software licenses to the campaign—which averages out to just under $500 per staffer.






e kinda link lo...donation amounts unnai..

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-team-obamas-tech-efficiency-left-romney-it-in-dust/

[rambabu304]

[tel_muddu]

[Vuthal_Bithal]

just, means just today after worktime

mangal shop lo, (barber shop) cutting ki cheskoni ochaa.

full fotos vunnayi, obama vunnaadu aa fotos lo,

shop name vundhi, outside foto vundhi, newspapers lo printmedia fotos chaala picture frames vunnaayi - obama visited that barber shop

==so , all your post is worthless. coz there was no leader there.



padha yathra kaadhu adhi. greencardlu free kaadhi adhi.
change for a change chiranjeevi kaadhu adhi.

your post is for your one situation.

[PMREDDY19]

oridayyaa

inni technologies use chesaara veeelu kuda...