Case Study: Alameda County serves election maps at high speed and low cost with AWS Lambda

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

Alameda County needed a way to deliver election results quickly and reliably to thousands of concurrent users on a day when demand spikes dramatically. Its older on-premises GIS-based election viewer crashed during the 2014 election, and the county faced rising costs and uncertainty as it looked for a replacement. To solve the problem, Alameda County turned to AWS Lambda and other AWS services, including Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS IAM.

Using AWS, Alameda County rebuilt the results viewer as a serverless, cloud-based application that normalized data with AWS Lambda and stored rendered maps for reuse, reducing repeated processing. The new system handled more than 3,000 concurrent users with no performance issues, delivered initial page loads in two to three seconds and sub-second responses afterward, and supported mobile access for 80% of users. The election-night compute cost was just $25, while the county avoided an estimated $20,000 in development costs plus the expense of additional servers, making AWS a fast, scalable, and extremely cost-effective solution.

Alameda County

Tim Dupuis

Chief Information Officer and Registrar