SRE and Presidential Campaigns

Monday, March 13, 2017 - 10:55am11:20am

Nat Welch, Hillary for America

Abstract: 

Hillary for America was the organization created for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. By election day, the campaign employed 82 software developers. A team of four SREs and two Security Engineers helped protect and scale close to a hundred backend services against a constant stream of DDoS, looming deadlines and constantly shifting priorities. 

This team helped build an environment to promote building new projects in a week for immovable deadlines, raising billions of dollars from donors, and withstand spiky and semi-unpredictable traffic. We will walk through how they did this, the unusual schedule of a presidential campaign and how that affects a growing tech team.

Nat Welch, Hillary for America

Nat Welch has been writing software professionally for over a decade. He was an early SRE on Google Compute Engine and at Hillary for America, along with doing full stack engineering for a variety of startups. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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BibTeX
@conference {201765,
author = {Nat Welch},
title = {{SRE} and Presidential Campaigns},
year = {2017},
address = {San Francisco, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}

Presentation Video 

Presentation Audio