The Obama Campaign's Technology Is a Force Multiplier - NYTimes.com

The politics of AWS + open source

"Another truly important change was in the technology itself. “Cloud computing barely existed in 2008,” Mr. Slaby said.
This time, the Obama campaign’s data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign’s engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.
Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software."

The Obama Campaign's Technology Is a Force Multiplier - NYTimes.com