Case Study: Alameda County achieves high‑speed, low‑cost, scalable election map delivery with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Alameda County Serves Election Maps at High Speed, Low Cost Using AWS

Alameda County, California—home to more than 1.5 million residents—faced a recurring problem: its legacy, on‑premises GIS election‑results viewer couldn’t reliably serve thousands of concurrent users on election night. After a 2014 crash and a costly, uncertain $20,000-plus fix that still required extra servers, the county needed a scalable, low‑risk way to deliver fast, mobile‑friendly results for a one‑day spike in demand.

The county rebuilt the viewer on AWS using Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, CloudFront, and IAM, re‑architecting the app to pre‑render maps as JSON and optimize mobile access. After successful load testing, the system handled 3,000+ concurrent users on election night with initial load times of 2–3 seconds and sub‑second follow‑ups, eliminated year‑round hardware costs, avoided the $20K redevelopment and server spend, and incurred just $25 in compute charges. The county open‑sourced the solution, won awards, and has since expanded cloud adoption.

Alameda County

Tim Dupuis

Chief Information Officer and Registrar