Learning from First Responders: When Your Systems Have to Work

One of the side stories of the 2012 presidential campaign was the success of Obama's software team. The team built their software in-house, and put into practice many ideas from the DevOps world. Game day was one of the most important: an exercise in which part of the team tried as hard as possible to break their systems, while the rest of the team tried to keep things running. They simulated everything from database failure to massive network outages. And as a result, when the election came, they were certain that they could respond to any crisis.