Devops and donors: How the Obama campaign built its fundraising platform

Just as the Christmas rush season puts a strain on Amazon today, or how Mother’s Day inundated the phone company last century, political fundraising requires maximum effort for a relatively short amount of time and failure isn’t an option. At least that’s the message behind Kyle Rush’s post on how he built the infrastructure to support President Barack Obama’s fundraising API.

That API helped the Obama team raise $250 million of the $1.1 billion total it raised for his re-election campaign. The post details the evolution of the fundraising platform from a hosted service provided by Blue State Digital to a redundant, dual-platform API that had the lowest latency possible. Rush, who was the deputy director of front end web development at Obama for America, lays out how the six engineers working on the fundraising side created a web-based API for accepting donations for the Obama campaign in early 2012. The goals of the team were to make sure the API was always available (when a platform can take in $3 million in donations in a single hour, downtime is pricey), that it scaled and that it was fast, since millisecond delays make people second-guess their decision to spend/give money.