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.

• They simulated everything from database failure to massive network outages.

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. And as a result, when the election came, they were certain that they could respond to any crisis.