VOTE411.org was re-launched on AWS in August 2012. In September and October, the site saw 50,000 unique visitors per day, rising to 300,000 visitors the day before the election and 500,000 visitors the day of the election. The most data-intensive page loaded in under 400ms. Other pages loaded in under 100ms. AWS provided continual availability during peak usage, scaling from 3 server instances in August to 60 instances on Election Day.

“Using AWS helped us create solutions that would not have been possible in a traditional environment,” Senecal says. “We could create instances on demand to handle data clean-up and import. With a different host, we would not have been able to create solutions as quickly.”

LWVEF was able to get the site up and running quickly by using AWS, which freed the organization from commissioning a set number of servers before beginning development. “Since we could scale up or down as necessary, our developers didn’t have to predict the number of servers they required in advance,” Senecal says. “A different environment would have added several weeks to our development time.”

AWS is critical in LWVEF’s performance tuning. “We use Amazon EC2 instances to conduct our load tests,” Senecal says. “This made it very easy to test the site, adjust the settings, and test again. After the site launched, changes to the site warranted another load test. In AWS Elastic Beanstalk, it was easy to create a new environment that matched the live environment.”

The team is exploring the use of AWS for hosting other LWV websites.