For many years, I championed the creation and operation of the stori.es SaaS platform for Consumer Reports. This user-generated content management system enables non-profits to collect qualitative and quantitative data from their supporters: real stories from real people. That data is exceptionally valuable both in bulk and at the level of individual experiences reported by faithful and verified observers.
Activity on many data collection platforms comes in bursts driven by events or directed by outreach efforts including email blasts. Consumer Reports is a large non-profit, and their trustworthiness and broad mission enabled the acquisition of a large email house file greater than one million people. Our SaaS infrastructure was hosted on Amazon Web Services and supported auto-scaling, but it could take a few minutes to boot up new EC2 instances once scaling thresholds were reached. Worse, we had yet to address