In my book, overengineering is defined as doing more work than is necessary to ensure that the risks are within acceptable bounds.
As the author points out, having the Times election site go down on election eve would be a BIG PROBLEM -- massive losses in both reputation and advertising revenue. For the system architect, a failure could possibly mean losing his job.
What the author has laid out is a system that is robust to multiple, simultaneous failures (with possible exception of the loss of AWS, although that's not entirely clear). That just seems like good planning.
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In my book, overengineering is defined as doing more work than is necessary to ensure that the risks are within acceptable bounds.
As the author points out, having the Times election site go down on election eve would be a BIG PROBLEM -- massive losses in both reputation and advertising revenue. For the system architect, a failure could possibly mean losing his job.
What the author has laid out is a system that is robust to multiple, simultaneous failures (with possible exception of the loss of AWS, although that's not entirely clear). That just seems like good planning.