What Developers Can Learn From Healthcare.gov 267
An anonymous reader writes "Soured by his attempt to acquire a quote from healthcare.gov, James Turner compiled a short list of things developers can learn from the experience: 'The first highly visible component of the Affordable Health Care Act launched this week, in the form of the healthcare.gov site. Theoretically, it allows citizens, who live in any of the states that have chosen not to implement their own portal, to get quotes and sign up for coverage. I say theoretically because I've been trying to get a quote out of it since it launched on Tuesday, and I'm still trying. Every time I think I've gotten past the last glitch, a new one shows up further down the line. While it's easy to write it off as yet another example of how the government (under any administration) seems to be incapable of delivering large software projects, there are some specific lessons that developers can take away. 1) Load testing is your friend.'"
Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:3)
No accountability of the contractors, no accountability of those who were to oversee the contractors and no accountability of the people who were to oversee those overseeing the contractors.
and I was ønce bitten by a møøse nø realli!
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Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
I went through the site and found it responsive. Possibly the time of day and my western timezone had something to say about it, but had no issues.
Even CNN looks bad when something major happens and everyone hits them at once, despite humming along for months without any issues.
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure load testing alone would be the solution. For a site like this, I see little point in making the expenditure to handle all the day 0 traffic.
Rather they should have load tested to find out how many users they could safely serve. Then they should have simply restricted the number of active connections. Other users should have seen a static holding page. That way, everyone that gets through gets a good experience.
By adopting this approach, you can save money. And, given the publicity available pre launch, they could easily have explained how this would work so as to manage expectations. After the first few week or so, they would likely be able to manage the traffic comfortably.
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
Because there are so many laws about making the government use contractors instead of hiring employees (because private sector is allegedly so much more efficient), damn near everything has to be contracted out. Then the contractors fail to deliver, they go over budget and come in way behind schedule. The government has no choice but to pay them and accept their useless work, again, due to more laws about "helping the private sector".
There's no way to fire a contractor or even to hold them to their original contract. They agreed to do something for a certain price? Too bad, they're going to sue the government and use those biased laws in order to deliver less than half of what they promised at more than 3 times the price they quoted and agreed to.
Re:Reminds me of vendor systems I deal with (Score:5, Informative)
This is exactly what I have seen over the last couple of decades. Your comments seem to be directed at contracted projects, but I see ongoing federal contracts that hire minimum wage employees to replace skilled federal employees. The costs are more than the costs to hire federal employees and the corporation pockets a nice profit, but the services are substandard. Contractors are supposedly an overall cost savings because if the need for the work moves or disappears, there are no federal employees to move or RIF. The problem is that some of these contracts have been ongoing for decades, and are coming close to the length of a federal employee's entire career!
Federal contracts do NOT save money, but they do profit the corporations that donate to politicians' political campaigns.
How is it even still up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing shows up the sheer arbitrariness of a government shutdown than some sites like Healthcare.gov being up, and others being forced to shut down at extra expense when they could have just been left running (and the servers that are there just to tell you the site is shut down are still consuming power and bandwidth).
Can't 0wn a powered-off server (Score:5, Informative)
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That would explain a closed website.
It does nothing to explain websites that were left on and serving a "shutdown" page, in some cases, using a redirect such that the actual page loads before sending you to the block page.
It is more directly comparable to Wikipedia's SOPA protest in function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome [wikipedia.org] has been brought up a few times.
Mandatory spending (Score:3)
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It's up because they had a separately authorized source of funds.
Remember we haven't hit the debt limit yet, we hit the government budget limit.
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Also remember that we hit a time limit. October 1st is just the start of the fiscal year, and the shutdown is just waiting for direction on how the next year is going to run.
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing shows up the sheer arbitrariness of a government shutdown than some sites like Healthcare.gov being up, and others being forced to shut down at extra expense when they could have just been left running (and the servers that are there just to tell you the site is shut down are still consuming power and bandwidth).
One more time, because some people clearly haven't read it or heard it: The Affordable Healthcare Act is not affected because it was fully funded. The budget Continuing Resolution is for things which are not already funded.
That means nothing (Score:2)
The Affordable Healthcare Act is not affected because it was fully funded. The budget Continuing Resolution is for things which are not already funded.
And? Sites that require no funds to keep open because they are just sitting there 24x7 are being closed down. Privately funded areas around national parks, that are fully funded and privately owned, are being told they must shut down also.
Perhaps YOU have not heard or read it, but the federal government is shutting down everything it can, even if it's alrea
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Nothing shows up the sheer arbitrariness of a government shutdown than some sites like Healthcare.gov being up, and others being forced to shut down at extra expense when they could have just been left running (and the servers that are there just to tell you the site is shut down are still consuming power and bandwidth).
Apparently nearly every government agency under the sun has taken to sabotaging their sites to I assume make a statement about how much not getting paid sucks.
While I understand it is still childish and offensive to taxpayers. I would respect an agency if their site and servers were actually shut down or if they left a message saying sorry content may not be up to date... very few I know anything about are actually doing that.
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I wouldn't believe breitbart.com if it told me that the sky was blue.
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Your disbelief is a different issue than the reports being wrong. But, I can understand your stance. Some people prefer to only drink from the approved water carriers, especially if news from other sources might cause uncomfortable facts and thoughts to creep into one’s mind. Rest easy with your approved news, citizen.
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lol, no idea what the site was so had to check. Private airshow...was alternative to canceled military one....AT A MILITARY BASE... yup, totally not related to gov, eh? ;p
Good to know there are still sites with 'better'headlines than us ;)
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Please resists the urge to cite breitbart dailycaller or foxnews as your sources. These places do not have any credibility in many people's eyes.
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, let's believe there is some neutral news site that we can all agree to use for news....
But, first, let's agree to get rid of the partisan sources:
NPR, CNN, nytimes, dailykos, slate, politico, washingtonpost on the left
foxnews, breitbart, redstate, hotair, instapundit on the right
What is left?
Thanks for pointing out the need to ban references to these sites....it's a good things our founding fathers agreed to ban unapproved speech...we definitely should not trust even our adults to properly filter out biased news sources....
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Give me a break, there is a huge difference between NPR and Breitart. Breitbart has no journalistic standards and will run a story (e.g. the Acorn pimp scandal) well after the facts are clearly counter to what he's pushing. NPR prides itself on striving to be as non partisan and objective as possible.
I'm so sick and tired of this false equivalency. Is there bias in every source of news? Yes. Even when you endeavor and pride yourself on trying to live up to an ideal you will screw up. Everyone is huma
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:5, Insightful)
All that needs to happen is for Boehner to bring the Senate bill to the floor of the House and BOOM the government will reopen because there are enough moderate Republicans + Democrats to pass it.
The idea that the Democrats are forcing the Government to close is ludicrous.
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All that needs to happen is for Boehner to bring the Senate bill to the floor of the House and BOOM the government will reopen because there are enough moderate Republicans + Democrats to pass it.
All that needed to happen for it not to happen at all is for the Senate Democrats to jump the party line and approve the continuing resolution the House had already passed.
The idea that the Democrats are forcing the Government to close is ludicrous.
They're the ones who control the Senate and decided to force a conference committee which they knew wasn't going to accept their version. They're also the party of the current President, who is refusing to negotiate. From here: [go.com]:
But Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the president reiterated that they would hold firm in their position.
So, no, the Democrats are not the innocent party here. They'd rather see a shutdown than a delay in funding A
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Wrong. The Senate voted on the House's bill and rejected it.
How am I wrong when that's what I said? The Democrats in the Senate toed the party line and refused to pass the House continuing resolution, substituting their own, forcing the matter to a conference committee that they knew wouldn't accept their version. Had the Senate Democrats opted to avoid the shutdown, all they had to do was pass the House bill intact. It really was that simple.
Re:How is it even still up? (Score:5, Insightful)
> So, no, the Democrats are not the innocent party here. They'd rather see a shutdown than a delay in funding ACA which doesn't prevent the exchanges from opening anyway.
A delay in funding of the ACA is not part of ANY bill provided by the House.
The bills that were provided either completely defund the ACA or delay the individual mandate.
It is utterly preposterous to engage in this sort of legislative action when people in many states are in the process of signing up for these programs. It would be nuts to change the law at this time. They are taking the scurrilous tactic of attaching a bill that would never pass on its own to a measure needed to run the rest of the government. It's despicable. It is a form of blackmail.
The bills passed by the House also prohibit Congress and its employees from receiving a subsidy for the plans they purchase from the exchanges, (something every other employer who provides coverage offers) and they make optional various women's health programs. Including breast feeding services and battered wife counseling services.
Ultimately trying to change policy as part of a continuing resolution is absolute insanity. These bills have have historically been limited to only technical changes in law.
The last time this sort of shenanigans were tried was in 1995 when a Republican Congress tried to change the Medicare contribution rate. It too led to a government shutdown. Back then the Republicans were also rightly blamed for over-reaching.
The history is there. The Republicans are repeating the same damn mistakes they made in 18 years ago. The will suffer the same outcome as before.
There is nothing to negotiate. Policy decisions do not belong in a CR. By including policy changes in a CR the Republicans are forcing a shutdown.
The fact remains that a clean CR would pass the House. It is the will of the representatives of the people who are elected by the voters to pass such a bill.
The only people preventing the introduction and passage of this are the Republican leadership. It is THEIR decision to shut down the government of the United States.
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Alright, I'll bite. One of those headlines is preposterous enough to warrant clicking... I wonder how exactly one pulls off a "private air" anything, what with the FAA, airports, and various safety groups all being government bodies...
Okay, that wasn't too bad, just run-of-the-mill ignorance. It's private aircraft flying from a Marine base, and with no budget the military can't legally authorize the expense of opening the base and running the show. As expected, the article makes a big deal about a wholly-ex
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I wonder how exactly one pulls off a "private air" anything, what with the FAA, airports, and various safety groups all being government bodies...
Use of public airspace does not make an airshow produced by private individuals a government function. Obtaining the necessary FAA waivers and TFRs and NOTAMs for an airshow does not make a private airshow a government function. There are private, state, city, and county run airports all over the place. And EAA is a private organization that regularly holds one of the largest aviation events [airventure.org] in the world.
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Somebody has to approve the waivers, and those small airports still usually get federal funding, sometimes being the only reason they stay operational. I've helped organize an air show before, and there's a ton of paperwork that gets shuffled off to the federal government for approval. Even if the organizations involved are essential enough to stay operational, they still may not have the ability to spend money on frivolous things like approving air shows.
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No, but much of their PR functions are. Who's going to clean up after the crowd coming in for the show? Who's going to stand out there at the table talking about airplane specs? And how are they justifying those expenses as "essential"?
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Blame Canada? (Score:4, Interesting)
Canadian firm hired to build troubled Obamacare exchanges [washingtonexaminer.com]
A Canadian tech firm that has provided service to that country's single-payer health care system is behind the glitch-ridden United States national health care exchange site healthcare.gov.
CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. With offices in Fairfax, Va., the subsidiary has been a darling of the Obama administration, which since 2009 has bestowed it with $1.4 billion in federal contracts, according to USAspending.gov.
The "CGI" in the parent company's name stands for "Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique" in French, which roughly translates to "Information Systems and Management Consultants." However, the firm offers another translation: "Consultants to Government and Industry."
The company is deeply embedded in Canada’s single-payer system. CGI has provided IT services to the Canadian Ministries of Health in Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Saskatchewan, as well as to the national health provider, Health Canada, according to CGI's Canadian website.
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It's a Quebec company... they're fucked. It's like hiring a "European" company which just happens to be run out of Sicily. They're so stupidly corrupt there, that I can honestly say they deserved it.
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According to the article the project has been behind schedule for a while:
Earlier this year the U.S. Government Accountability Office criticized the pace of development and testing for Healthcare.gov.'s IT system and noted that it was missing important milestone deadlines.
This is worrying as it suggests this isn't the case of a few glitches and poor load testing, the project might simply not be done.
In defence of CGI (since I'm Canadian and will reflexively look for excuses for my cultural brethren) it's no
main quote (Score:3)
The biggest takeaway though, is that the way that the federal government bids out software is fundamentally broken. There are clearly companies in the industry who understand exactly the kind of problems that healthcare.gov needed to address. Intuit’s online TurboTax is much more complicated than the sign-up process for healthcare, and it works under heavy load. Amazon and Google both handle crushing loads gracefully as well. Why can’t the government draw on this kind of expertise when designing a site as critical to the public as healthcare.gov, rather than farming it out to the lowest bidder?
Although it's not entirely right.....government contracts are more complicated than 'going to the lowest bidder.'
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Government contracts typically come with a large list of requirements (on the order of 500 pages), almost entirely written by a committee with no idea what they're actually looking for. They'll require silly things like "must weigh over 1750 pounds" or "[a Windows XP system] must be accessible via VT-100 terminal", or my personal favorite, "all components [including electronics] must be manufactured in the United States or France".
I'm told, though I haven't seen it myself, that the requirements aren't actua
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Management knows they go out of business if they don't. But more importantly, it's not just a question of incentives, it's that the many companies that have tried to compete with Amazon, Google, and Facebook and provided a worse user experience have actually gone out of business. We're left with the better experiences because those are the only ones that survived.
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Intuit's online TurboTax is much more complicated ..
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it Intuit's TurboTax that scribbled data into some of the first 63 sectors of the user's hard drive as a primitive means of DRM? Yes [slashdot.org], I did remember correctly. They're also the company that runs my credit union's web presence and have arbitrarily decided what characters a valid email address can contain -- in violation of the RFC. Certainly, let's have Intuit do the website for people who need health insurance and must buy it or face penalties.
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Intuit's online TurboTax is much more complicated than the sign-up process for healthcare, and it works under heavy load.
To be fair, TurboTax didn't always work well under heavy load. It has evolved over the years so now it works just fine. Something to keep in mind.
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So... because it took a while for TurboTax to reach the level of stability they have today... we should just accept the feds incompetence in this area?
I would think what should be kept in mind is those who built & run healthcare.gov seemingly never bothered to reach out to companies & organizations which run massive data systems that can handle heavy load
Crazy requirement - usernames with numbers??? (Score:3)
From the list, one of the items casually mentions that usernames require numbers. What? I've never heard of a requirement like that from any other consumer system, ever.. they may suggest it (like YourName024 when a prior user has already used YourName) but do not require it.
If they worry about uniqueness, just use email addresses as logins.
When you leave your ISP (Score:3)
If they worry about uniqueness, just use email addresses as logins.
That's exploitable when you leave your ISP, someone else claims your username at that ISP, and your old ISP-provided e-mail address now points to another person.
Re: When you leave your ISP (Score:2)
Who the hell uses the email address provided by their ISP?
Personally, I use paid e-mail hosting services for my family's e-mail needs, at a domain that I own.
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I've seen that requirement from banks, and a gym of all places.
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I think it does make sense. Considering there are going to be millions of people on this, there will be thousands of duplicate names. So rather than let the first person with a particular name, for example 'Tony Martin', take the username of 'tonymartin', make all of the Tony Martins have a number in their name.
Later when the tenth Tony Martin who signed up calls for info about his account, and they ask for his user name, he can't just say it's 'tonymartin', and get someone else's information.* He could say
two things you can learn from it (Score:2)
If you can get it, get a government contract to implement some huge IT system; you can have cost overruns up the wazoo, miss your deadlines, and create unusable interfaces; there will likely be few consequences, the customers can't run away from you, and the pockets of the government are infinitely deep to cover whatever you want.
If you can't get in on such a boondoggle as a vendor, vote against any kind of politician who promises to solve problems with some huge, government-paid IT system; they rarely are
Your friend. (Score:2)
"Load testing is your friend."
In this case, any testing at all would have been friends to both developers and customers.
"Launched" is such an optimistic word... (Score:5, Funny)
"Launch" suggests that it actually, you know, worked.
When a quarter million people hit a game company's servers and only half of them get to play, it's a disaster of unrivaled proportions.
When millions of people hit billions of dollars in government investment and a few thousand of them actually get the site to work at all, it's a "learning experience."
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s/launched/lurched/g
Or, if you prefer: a car analogy [youtube.com] (You can either jump to 1:07, or watch the whole thing.)
No worse/better than private business. (Score:5, Insightful)
GTA V? Sim City? Final Fantasy? Battlefield?
Turns out millions of users who start using something on the same day often don't follow the expected and tested for behavior.
Anyone who launches a service like this should expect to spend the first week in triage mode, and the first month making adjustments. I'd like to say proper planning would mean that never occurs, but the only way to insure that would be to spend 10x what is really needed. People would hate the government even worse if they did that.
This is not news, yet. It will be news in a month if it is still fubared.
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but the only way to insure that would be
... to log on to website and buy insurance :)
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That's what scalable architectures and cloud services are designed for. Expand and contract as necessary.
State Sites Also (Score:2)
The Washington State's exchange website, for which the state paid $54 million to Delloite LLC, hasn't been a rollicking success either. I'm trying to wrap my head around why it costs $54 million to set up a pretty straight-forward website (costs evidently do not include hardware, just people/time/software). I believe that cost was over half what the state received from the feds to set up the exchange. Details here (such as they are) [bizjournals.com].
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I'm going to guess that the lion's share of that money went to requirements gathering. A site like this which has to pull in data from dozens of different companies is going to have a lot of stakeholders. The consulting time for analysts and PM's to compile all of the user stories must have been immense. The actual development on the website itself doesn't look like it could have consumed more than a couple of million. That being said, my team developed about a dozen sites per year of comparable complex
How about management? (Score:2)
When your boss says you're going to launch on October 3 no matter what, you get whatever you've got.
I've occasionally (thankfully not often) had to turn out things I'm not proud of for customers who have no idea how to schedule and won't hear otherwise. Stuff like the front end/back end error handling is high up the chopping block.
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I guess my boss & I are better at planning than 'your boss'... as we'll work together to scope out what sort of work is realistic in a given time frame... do that, and then re-evaluate... and do this multiple times during a dev/release cycle.
By the end not everything we wanted may be in the box, but it works.
Though not being able to get this whole mess right after 3 years another sign of their poor planning.
You meant, "What Project Managers can learn..." (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a personal gripe about folks who think that 'developer' is code for 'guy who's expected to do everything in the project'. Outside of small projects, that's not how it should work in a healthy software development lifecycle.
Developers architect and write code, and some of the topics covered in that short editorial are relevant; use of AJAX necessitates good error handling on the front end, and synchronization of client and server side validations. Sure, they may have a broad skillset besides and understand databases, and graphical design, and so on, but there's no guarantee they're the ones meant to provide those skills.
For example, QA encompasses an incredibly large set of skills, familiarity with a wide range of products, and to be fair, seems to attract folks with a different life philosophy than those who identify themselves as developers. To talk about load testing - which itself is not a simple unit test to be added to a build - as a developer's responsibility, and ignore the vast, separate set of specialized knowledge and experience required to pull it off is ignorance. To include UX and UI design, and say these too are in the developers purview is equally misguided. (in fact, most developers are really, really bad at UI/UX, for some reason)
Not that a developer couldn't do those things, or will automatically lack the knowledge or skills, but those are separate roles and separate disciplines.
So, tell a project manager that they should make sure the QA team does load testing, and tell the project manager that the UI/UX team needs to provide descriptive error messages when validation fails, and so on. Very little of this is important to someone who's currently wearing the 'developer' hat.
very interesting situation (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh duh. (Score:3)
Odd, in my state it worked fine...no, wait a minute, it's only Oct. 4th, who in their right mind with technical savvy or experience would access such a new product in the first week of it's availability?
I live in one of the most population dense states. My current health insurance is paid up through the end of the month. I won't be accessing the exchange for three weeks yet because everything in the article is obvious, but even if implemented within the time constraints to the best of their ability, will still probably have issues in the first few days.
Duh.
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My current health insurance is paid up through the end of the month. I won't be accessing the exchange for three weeks yet ...
You better send of a couple more payments to your current insurance company. ACA coverage through the exchanges doesn't start until 1 Jan 2014.
Stupid design (Score:4, Informative)
architecture (Score:3, Interesting)
Did a little sleuthing and discovered they're using an F5 load balancer in front of it (at least my state exchange is). I'm rather shocked that they chose a classical client/server architecture and not say, a cloud architecture for this. This could have been written on Google's cloud or Amazon's or OpenStack even and probably done a much better job of handling this load.
I would surmise that HIPPA requirements may have made cloud architecture problematic.
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I've seen several people say "the cloud is the answer". I have one simple counter example:
Reddit. Any time they have a flash mob, and seemingly randomly almost every day they fail.
The clould does some things better and some things worse, and scales in different ways than a more traditional layout. Both can work if properly implemented, and one or the other may be faster/cheaper/better depending on specific site requirements.
California's site is running well (Score:2)
I checked out California's exchange web site and it's running fast. No problem registering or logging in and it's well designed to let you see your options.
California is a state which is completely in control of the Democrats. We don't have the tea baggers who are trying to destroy government here. (I think there are a few but we ignore them and they are powerless.) Government (and most other things) work better here.
I'd Believe You... (Score:4, Insightful)
load balancing and queuing (Score:2)
It is worth noting that a raspberry pie computer could handle the work load of all the requests for healthcare.gov with correct load balancing and queuing. For PR you would need to set some expectation such as estimated wait time to get into the system, however your customer base would at least know that the system is working and that they just need to wait their turn due to the high demand. It is incorrect for most systems to be architected to assume everyone who accesses your system gets helped right away
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Admittedly Raspberry Pi as an example is a bit extreme for this workload. But for fun, think about this. 3byte session token is ~16.7 million 4 billion if you go 4byte. The Pi has 512MB of memory. 16.7 million bytes is about 50MB. So lets say you load embedded linux, a small web server, and support tools hmm 32MB. Think you web developers out there could write a website in perl, c, or c++ with only 430 MB of memory? You couldn't get too crazy with images, but I think someone out there could do it.
But what a
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16.7 million bytes is about 50MB.
I vote we hire you as the government website author. You've proven an ability to inflate simple numbers by a factor of three, which is about a factor of six less than current contractors usually do.
You can architect the system to server only one person at a time.
So if there are just 1 million people who need to sign up for insurance and they take ten minutes each to review the material and decide, that means you'd have all of them "servered" in just 19 years. The CT website that had 100,000 visitors in the first day would have had all of them dealt with by sometime in
Have Patience (Score:4, Insightful)
If a web site is rushed into place on October 1st but there's no reason to sign up until January 1st, wait several weeks before you try use it.
It's not slashdot. There's no advantage to getting FIRST POST!!!
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If a web site is rushed into place on October 1st but there's no reason to sign up until January 1st,
Well, if you want to avoid a fine for not having insurance and you want to use the exchange, you need to have signed up by December 15. That would be a good reason not to wait until Jan 1.
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You need to sign up by December 15th to get coverage January 1st. But your general point still stands.
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Yet that's not what we hear when it comes to early voting.
At the State of the Union this year, Desiline Victor, 102, of Miami was a guest of Michelle Obama in the balcony... and during his speech the President highlighted the fact that she waited in line for 3 hours to vote.
What you didn't hear was that she showed up to vote on the first day of early voting in her ar
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I was under the impression that people who signed up before March 31, a one time delayed deadline, did not have to pay the 2014 fine. The deadline for subsequent years would be December 15th.
And the first year fine, $95 or 1% of income, whichever is larger.
Oregon in the same boat (Score:2)
Oregon paid millions to Oracle for their own solution. It was a disaster. It did not work for me as I kept getting errors. And Oregon actually opted for a simple solution where you could not actually sign up for a plan online. You only received information about available plans. 3 years and millions of dollars later, they could not make that work reliably. As a developer I am baffled.
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And Oregon actually opted for a simple solution where you could not actually sign up for a plan online.
No, that's not what we opted for. The exchange is supposed to allow people to sign up, but since the site wasn't completed and couldn't provide information on the prices based on income, they disabled the ability to sign up and have made it "coming soon".
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In defense of Oracle... Oregon is a state where you cannot be trusted to fuel up your own vehicle... so why do you think they'd let you buy something as important as government mandated health insurance online?
Why it wasn't easy to handle the number of users.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone goes on the assumption that scale is "just make it bigger". I'd like to add some of my own notes on why this launch was doomed from the start.
I used to work for an adult internet company who had massive traffic. We were serving millions of people daily before 2000. We would exceed 10M daily viewers about once a week. That fluctuated by rather consistent calendar influences, like the day of the week, part of the month, and part of the year. Sept 11, 2011 dropped 3/4 of our traffic for almost exactly 2 hours. So we knew how long huge news event would impact us.
To handle 10M customers without a hiccup, we had to consider a lot of things. We didn't do much dynamic content. That's a killer. There were some elements that had to be dynamic, such as the voting/polling systems, message forums, etc. Otherwise, we had to try to keep the pages (html and images) as light as possible.
The hardest abused system we had was user authentication and authorization. We only had a few million users that hit it, but there were thousands of hackers (and script kiddies) that wanted to try to get something for nothing. Come on, it was cheap porn, just pay for it. We could easily see over 10M auth requests per hour. In time, we fine tuned the system, and outright blocked abusive users at the firewall.
The advantage we had was, when I was first in control over the IT work, we'd only see about 1M/day, so we had the luxury of growing it out. We'd watch for the problematic parts, and fix them. What works on your test bed where 10,000 users try it, even if they try hard, it doesn't mean you can put it on 100 servers and expect it to work for 1M users.
healthcare.gov has some other severe disadvantages. From what I understand, they are hitting the SSA database. I don't know if that's an online query to the SSA, or if they're provided a static file to import periodically. I'd assume all kinds of government organizations have put their 2 cents in too. What are they checking identity against? Drivers licenses, SS cards, voter ID, green cards? That means they could be hitting 151+ more databases run by other organizations. Does DHS get the information? Is it fed back to them when a users accesses? Are the checked against law enforcement databases? Only those directly involved in the development will know. You can disregard anything in the privacy statements. You're not going to see a friendly note in the FAQ "If you're a wanted felon, information will be transmitted to the law enforcement organization looking for you." That kind of defeats the purpose.
Depending on load testing never replicates what real users will do. Real users do weird things, just because they can. No amount of planning and testing will give you everything. There is always a lot of reactive work to be done. Shit, everyone reads the FAQ 14 times before logging in? They 20% of the people go through the login screens, back out to the 2nd page, and try again?
I'm stuck on the same non-functional healthcare.gov site as everyone else is. I signed up. I never got an email confirmation or email address verification.
My girlfriend got the verification and signed up again. I was able to present my user:pass and it did seem to say it was valid, but stayed there until I was thrown the overloaded message. Later, it said my user:pass was invalid. Is it really invalid?
I tried to do the username and password recovery. Neither sent me anything, so I assumed my account wasn't made. When signing up again, it said my combination of email, username, and real name was not unique. Ok, so I'm at least partly there.
I signed up again with a different username. This time I received the email verification, and clicking it did say I was confirmed to be a user. I still can't get in. It says my user:pass is wrong. Is there som
Amazon can't do it either. (Score:2)
This was a strange comparison. Amazon often loads very slow for me, and pages fail to load completely on a regular basis.
irs.gov used to be a good example of a fast site. It is not as fast as it used to be, but still about 3x faster than Amazon, probably due to a static design with few images.
Why do I have to register just to get information? (Score:2)
Tuesday I did the signup process,
Re:Real demand or Right-Wing DDOS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's have our great media investigate if this is poor planning...or good planning if once the initial load gets through then they didn't overspend on equipment they don't need.
Or if there is a secret effort by the people who want this to fail to hire botnets and hackers to DDOS it... I wouldn't put it past them.
Would be something to see a considerable amount of traffic going out from Newscorp ip addresses into the healthcare.gov servers.
nothing unusual, aside a few million malformed packets...
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That would b
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That would be an even more stupid idea than Newscorp buying MySpace.
Project Managers can learn giving only minimal time for QA, at the very end of the project, with no time allotted for corrections is bad practice.
"Are we meeting with some network engineers, tech writers and systems analysts?"
"No, we are meeting with a bunch of appointees who know next to nothing about the guts of the project.
"Great... we may as well watch cartoons."
Re:Real demand or Right-Wing DDOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd have a hard time believing that the servers have been this consistently overwhelmed with traffic. A more likely explanation is that a poorly designed system was patched together from components hastily built from a thousand different vendors. The web-app equivalent of a diesel engine held together with duct-tape and baling wire was then rolled out without any real testing.
The only time, "Good enough for government work," has ever escaped my lips was when I was confronted with a marginally functional mess of spaghetti code.
Re:Real demand or Right-Wing DDOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I'd have a hard time believing that the servers have been this consistently overwhelmed with traffic. A more likely explanation is that a poorly designed system was patched together from components hastily built from a thousand different vendors. The web-app equivalent of a diesel engine held together with duct-tape and baling wire was then rolled out without any real testing.
The only time, "Good enough for government work," has ever escaped my lips was when I was confronted with a marginally functional mess of spaghetti code.
You needn't source from multiple vendors to get a system that falls apart under load - single vendor solutions are also susceptible to such problems.. Even if you specify load testing in the contract, that doesn't mean that their load test had any relation to actual real-world load. Of course, the hard part is predidcting what load to expect, especially with a system that has a potential audience of 100+ million people.
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definitely not a DDOS. LOIC is going to cause the kinds of errors I've seen.
Re:The basic problem (Score:4, Funny)
Because they are the only ones who actually have successfully created healthcare systems on that scale, specifically medicare, medicaid, and the VA system.
Re:What can they learn (Score:5, Informative)
How about this one, hire an Indian firm to run a government level oracle database without actually testing it or including load-balancing and you're gonna have a bad time.
Blame your horrendous failure on user volume and then call it glitches and you're gonna have a bad time.
List of known issues in order of appearance:
01. security questions not loading.
02. security answers failing validation.
03. email validation tokens timing out instantly.
04. correct passwords failing
05. password reset emails not providing clickable link for reset
06. password reset link loads page which doesn't find the profile it just emailed to.
07. EIDM server crashing and throwing system down errors.
08. oracle server errors.
09. network gateway timeout errors.
10. oracle account manager loading towards public
All of this excluding the actual waiting pages for a website.
This is either gross incompetence or sabotage.
Re:What can they learn (Score:4, Funny)
I just successfully logged in. to a blank page.
Re:What can they learn (Score:4, Interesting)
I predict the way you're using two digits to count the errors is going to turn into a scalability limit.
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Not one god damned fucking thing.
Not true, I learned that the portal is as useful as a politician. Considering the failure to balance the budget, reining in of these arrogant bastards who declared war on the American people. Over time will one understand the uselessness of these politicians and their insurance industry written healthcare policies. These CONgressMEN are as bankrupt as the nation they supposedly lead.
Re:What can they learn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want to do this? If you had an income that fluctuated each year, would you not save in the good years so you could maintain a reasonable quality of lifestyle in the barren years? Or would you downsize your house and sell your car every other year as your income fluctuated.
Balancing the budget is not the challenge. The real challenge is finding a government that can save when the going is good, and convincing the US electorate of the need for a rainy-day fund, rather than giving it all back and more in tax breaks.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a challenge at all. Texas does it. We're required by our state constitution to have a balanced budget, and we only let our legislature meet for 150 days every other year. The result: once they are in session, they're working to hammer out the new budget and fix the real problems, instead of constantly being in session feeling the need to legislate something, messing things up, and wrecking the economy.
It works so great that our economy in Texas attracts a constant stream of refuges fleeing the c
Re:What can they learn? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a challenge at all. Texas does it. We're required by our state constitution to have a balanced budget, and we only let our legislature meet for 150 days every other year. The result: once they are in session, they're working to hammer out the new budget and fix the real problems, instead of constantly being in session feeling the need to legislate something, messing things up, and wrecking the economy.
Yeah. They never feel the need to legislate something, right? Only work to fix the real problems? They'd never decide that they needed a bit of extra time to legislate something just because they felt the need, right?
I'll just leave this here for people who maybe aren't absolute morons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Davis_(politician)#2013_filibuster [wikipedia.org]
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Uh, yeah.
Wendy was a voice of reason during that debacle; everybody else just glared at Texas and shook their heads.
Texas: what a country.
Re: (Score:3)
Texas has the federal government to fall back on in case of, for example, natural disaster. The federal government doesn't have such a safety net; it must self-insure. On top of that, the federal government has to be prepared for contingencies such as war that do not really apply at the state level.
The period of time, one year, is arbitrary. Requiring a balanced yearly federal budget would be like requiring a balanced personal budget every two week pay period, even though my biggest expenses occur monthl
Re: (Score:3)
Since it's the same government that paves our roads, funds our schools, cleans our water, forecasts the weather, explores space, prosecutes our criminals, and extinguishes our fires, yes. We may as well add "heals the injured" and "cures the sick" to that as well.
Ours is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Sure, we've got problems - big ones - but we are not doomed. The Great Experiment continues.
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Note that most of "paves our roads", "cleans our water", "prosecutes our criminals", and "extinguishes our fires" is done by our State governments, NOT the Federal government.