5 ms·
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 o
by trotsky 13y ago
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.
- bonertruck 13y agoThe campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.
- bonertruck 13y agoPerhaps that was a bit overly broad and not quite representative of what I meant to convey. The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing. Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care. Are you gonna tell them they can't have phones?
- saraid216 13y ago> The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing. I thought this was pretty obvious. > Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care. I have no idea what you're trying to convey here.
- bonertruck 13y agoThere is an existing fundraising infrastructure, an existing polling infrastructure, an existing media market infrastructure, all of these are highly successful and competitive and get candidates elected. When you're introducing sprawling new web based architectures into this mix you've got to prove the efficacy of every minute decision and improvement. There is very little trust.
- saraid216 13y agoSo... you're saying that a tech startup does not have to contend with existing infrastructures? Do I have that correct?
- trotsky 13y agoI guess I was being too dry, but I was suggesting that such massive deployments in multiple regions costs far more in ongoing fees and engineering effort than an equivalently performing environment that is managed by the end user (campaign). And yet with all that expense you still end up with less reliability and transient issues that you end up compensating for by even more over provisioning and rearchitecture. AWS is good for organizations that need to minimize upfront costs, orgs too small to support suitable ops staff, overflow traffic, people who hope they're about to hockeystick growth or have no idea if they'll even be around in a year. Also it's good for people busy wasting limited partner's money. It is, however, a pretty bad choice for a campaign with huge coffers, a large staff, certainty about the length of time they'll be in operation, and a very predictable seasonal use pattern. And of course they do it all with money from small contributors. I'm not saying that aws or especially cloud models aren't a wonderful tool in a lot of cases. But we're training a whole generation of web jockies who are reflexively going to AWS because they think ops and infrastructure is scary.
- mkr-hn 13y agoIsn't "uses tech to facilitate the things that people do" what a tech startup does?