Unveiling How the Cloud Ensured a Glitch-Free 2023 Election- Against What You Were Told

By Taghogho Von Apochi.

Let's explore why the 2023 Nigerian elections ran smoothly with zero technical hiccups. The INEC story of a technical glitch may not be totally correct. Think of it as a flawless performance, thanks to the power of cloud technology like AWS. AWS is the world's number public cloud provider and Microsoft Azure is number 2, and this rating is by fantastic rating organizations like Gartner, knowledge hut, sherweb, revology, and more. This is not an article for only tech heads. It is for all, and I broke it down to pieces.

During the elections, the server orchestrating everything was either a virtual machine (VM) deployed or the resources already available in the cloud was used either way, let's dub it our "Magic Machine or Magic Computer." The big question is what could have gone wrong with our Magic Machine? Let us answer this with two possibilities:

1. Internet Glitch: The INEC devices connecting to the server (Magic Machine), known as BVAS, could have faced internet issues.

2. Server Breakdown: The server (Magic Machines) might have crashed due to the need for updates or physical faults.

But here's why these scenarios were just a distant possibility:

1. MTN, the internet provider, confirmed no disruptions in their network on election day, correct me if I am wrong.

2. AWS, where our Magic Machine resides, has an ironclad agreement (SLA) ensuring almost zero downtime (downtime means the period the computer may slow down or stop working). It's like having a superhero backup plan with two cloud computer tools that we call scale sets and availability sets. Help me hold on to these two phrases.

Let me break it down so that we can all understand. Imagine watching a movie on TV, but instead of one TV, you have several spreads across different rooms. That's what scale sets do. So, if you have more guests coming in to watch the movie and one room is filled up, you still have more rooms to take these guests, remember these other rooms have similar TV showing the same movie. Now picture these guests as the volume of votes or data being captured to be processed by the magical machine. So, no matter the volume of votes at the election, it was impossible to have a glitch because our magical computer can scale up to take more data and scale down when the traffic is low without stopping or slowing down. This is a fact. guess what for the purpose of knowledge, there are two types of scaling, 1. vertical scaling where more processing units (CPU) ore more RAM (random access memory) increases automatically. 2. horizontal scaling is where VM (virtual Machine) or magic computer increases to accommodate more resources needed for the job.

Let us now look at the second tool called availability sets. This tool has two parts called update domain and fault domain. Let me explain. If one TV needs fixing like we need to fix one cable or component to enable it meet the present day standard, the show goes on in the other rooms. That's your update domain. This tells you that even if our machine needed to update a software on that election day, the voting would continue without interruptions because the other rooms would take up the responsibility of continuing the election process. remember it is automatic and in split seconds.

Now, picture each room having its own power and network setup. If one room has a problem, the others keep the movie rolling. That's your fault domain. This simply says that if one room has a fault and there is power failure, our elections would automatically in split seconds continue in the other room until the fault is fixed in the main room. This fixing does not affect anything.

So, by using these sets, it's like having backup theaters ready to take over, ensuring a smooth election process. And guess what? It doesn't cost extra! INEC doesn't pay extra money for these automatic transfer of computing power.

But wait, there's more: we've got availability zones and region pairs, like having multiple backup theaters in different cities or regions, just in case of a natural disaster. Wow! We are not just talking about rooms anymore but regions as far as 300 miles backing each other to avoid glitches. The Nigerian presidential election was too small a data weight to cause an AWS glitch.

disclaimer: To sum it up, this isn't about questioning anyone; it's about celebrating how cloud tech created a smooth election that was thought to have glitched and sharing that knowledge with the world.

Stay informed,
Taghogho Von Apochi

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