HN user
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.
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?
Yes and no. This diagram lays out how to do this kind of thing cheaply and scale the systems up and down quickly. It allows the campaign to bring these systems and services "in house" instead of contracting 3rd parties to manage adding boxes at great expense at the last minute based on best guesses of expected traffic. It allows you to respond to the spikes in traffic that are expected during a campaign and during promotions that would otherwise bring your site down or have you paying for unused bandwidth.
It is in a way. The department heads were very worried about the scrutiny and tone of the press in covering project narwhal and actively discouraged its use as a codename for the project.
Ask Scott why they ended up going with Akamai and how they, "reached out" to the campaign. Funny story.
The DNC does the job of folding any successful and reusable parts from the campaign into a continuing technology stack.
The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.