
Ask HN: How could the Australian digital census be architected to work? - andrewstuart
What ideas do you have for how to architect a digital census that succeeds?<p>I wonder if perhaps it might have worked better using editable Adobe PDF forms.
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shifte
As the Prime Minister said, it was load tested to handle 1M form submissions
an hour. Which is all of Australia completing it in 24 hours. The problem is
everyone did it at once, so we only have ourselves to blame.

But seriously, handling 23M form submissions in 1 hour, isn't too hard to do.
The 2 major considerations are: 1. How fast can we make the app handle that
submission, which honestly is probably just writing to a DB, 2. How many
servers so we need to scale out to do the work. You could do this on AWS
pretty well, there's much bigger customers on there doing much more load. I've
personally seen apps on AWS doing a sustained 1M concurrent requests per
minute with less than 10 servers.

The point is, out-sourcing government IT to Companies that are satisfied with
meeting the bare minimum requirements without any logical discussion about the
maximum requirements, results in CensusFail.

