Ask HN: How could the Australian digital census be architected to work?
What ideas do you have for how to architect a digital census that succeeds?
I wonder if perhaps it might have worked better using editable Adobe PDF forms.
I wonder if perhaps it might have worked better using editable Adobe PDF forms.
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.