[ale] Political but on topic... How Team Obama's tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust

[Michael H. Warfield]

What ever your political leanings, there is no question that the
Republican IT efforts with their project ORCA was an unmitigated
disaster.  What's very interesting is ARS Technica's examination of the
Obama IT infrastructure and what they did while spending less money.

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

It gets really interesting when they get into the use of Linux (Ubuntu)
servers and OpenSource tools...

-- 
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."
-- 

I love this one about Nagios.

-- 
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 boto (the Python programming interface to AWS's
services) and dotCloud's ZeroRPC 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."
-- 

ITMT...  Back at the ranch the Romney workers were still sorting out
their PINS.

Gotta love it...  OpenSource for da win!

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0x674627FF        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!
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