
Ask HN: Pondering Why the Social Security Website Shuts Down Nightly - Rebles
The Social Security Website (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ssa.gov) shuts down every night. Maybe for maintenance, but a part of me wonders if the primary driver is so that developers don&#x27;t get paged in the middle of the night for outages&#x2F;security breaches. What are your thoughts?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;fgkdCTi.jpg
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davismwfl
I wasn't aware of that, but no I don't think it has anything to do with
developers getting paged.

I have worked on these older systems that exist in government offices and I
have done work to integrate new systems to them over the years. So much of the
VA, SSA, IRS and a ton of other federal, state and local government systems
are focused around batch processing that they literally need that maintenance
window to update systems, synchronize datasets and do data imports/exports
etc. I saw just about 5ish years ago a system that still required 4 hours
nightly just to manage the backup and recovery, then another 2 to ingest data
from other agencies so that the agents had data to work off the next day. And
it wasn't rare that you had to wait 2-3 days for your transaction to process
through the system to get included in the update. Newer developers take for
granted all the technology and systems we have today and I think sometimes
feel it has always been that way, it hasn't. When I started doing work in the
early 90's offline backup windows were still normal, batch updates required
databases to be offline routinely etc. Yes, Oracle existed and was used some
places but most government agencies were still on mini computers or mainframes
which didn't generally support that type of software. Even the ISAM databases
of the time required compaction and cleanup nearly nightly which generally
needed some downtime (offline).

Hell, a couple of years ago there was an article talking about the IRS still
running a critical system that is 60 years old and written in a some assembly
type language that isn't well understood anymore. So not surprised the SSA
does this. lol

~~~
Rebles
Thanks for your insight. It's incredibly interesting! I suppose with so much
inter-departmental exchanges of information running on legacy HW/SW, I can see
why it might need several hours of downtime.

~~~
davismwfl
You’re welcome. I definitely get your question, no one would intentionally
make a transactional system like that today. With all the advances we have
made it just isn’t necessary anymore.

Although there are a few places where I can think that this pattern kinda
still exists today for good reason. For example, compliance reporting systems
where data is sliced off on a batch basis on some interval and pushed into a
different DB for read-only reporting etc. We did that for public accounting
compliance reports so the data was locked and non-updatable that produced the
reports. But there are other patterns which can be used too.

