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Perhaps 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 st

Perhaps 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 ago
  There 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 ago
    So... you're saying that a tech startup does not have to contend with existing infrastructures? Do I have that correct?
trotsky 13y ago
I 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.

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 ago
There 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 ago
  So... you're saying that a tech startup does not have to contend with existing infrastructures? Do I have that correct?

trotsky 13y ago

I 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.