Case Study: Obama for America achieves high-availability, automated release management with Puppet

Automated Operations and Controlled Release Management Kept Obama Campaign Above Water

Obama for America needed to run a massive, highly available infrastructure that could scale quickly, support frequent releases, and survive regional outages and peak events like Hurricane Sandy. The campaign’s challenge was to automate operations and manage risk across multiple environments while keeping deployments controlled and reliable.

They adopted DevOps practices and automation across three environments—production on AWS EC2, a smaller AWS staging, and an internal test environment—using Puppet and an internal application repository for release management. Multi–availability-zone deployments plus a western “warm” read‑only failover and multiple in‑app failover levels kept services running through crises, delivering uninterrupted operations, stronger team cohesion, and a new standard for scalability and redundancy.

Obama for America

Dylan Richard

Director of Engineering