Australian Census Website is melting down whilst entire country visits it

census.abs.gov.au

8 points·andrewstuart··4 comments

Based in Melbourne, Australian I can confirm that it is impossible to get on the census website. With a population of over 20 million and everyone supposed to fill in the online census on the same day, that some serious testing must have been done in advance. I mean, they must have tested it with a million simultaneous users? Didn't they? Or maybe their AWS account hit its credit limit?

It will have been implemented by a giant outsourcing company, think of the common names.

Lots of UML diagrams done. Lots of business analysis done overseas.

They should have paid Amazon $30M to do it properly.

Anyone have inside knowledge of the infrastructure used?

It's hard to imagine a better use case for using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud and spinning up a huge fleet of servers for 24 hours.

I suppose some misguided ideas around data security would have been used to shoot down the first engineer to suggest the cloud.

EDIT: just read to wluu's post. Sounds like we (tax payers) paid for an IBM "private cloud" that couldn't scale.

There's some details here: http://eftm.com.au/2016/08/census-2016-the-10-million-online...

"The ABS paid an Aussie company “Revolution IT Pty Ltd” $469,367.50 across three tenders to undertake “Load Testing Services for Census 2016”. $325,000 of that was for software licences to get the equipment required to do the testing, the rest we can assume was for the teams to actually undertake the testing."

And hosting is being provided by IBM: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/ibm-wins-96m-to-host-ecensus-i...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com