> Can I just make a guess that you don't know anything about the Healthcare.gov infrastructure? You can, but you couldn't be further from the truth. > Anyway,

> Can I just make a guess that you don't know anything about the Healthcare.gov infrastructure? You can, but you couldn't be further from the truth. > Anyway, you're are making general platitudes about "government systems" without regard for the level, department, or any other factor that would influence the quality. I guess, but that's not really relevant to my point, which is to refute the statement "There's no excuse for doing slow, blocking maintenance operations on a live user-facing database.". There is an excuse in government systems for this. You may not like it, and you may think it's an excuse that they should avoid, but that's one reason, and these sorts of issues are pretty common in government systems. You're correct that healthcare.gov is actually one of the better-functioning sites in that regard, but even if some aspects of it mitigate the shortcomings, that doesn't mean it's not subject to some of the other same limitations. > It would be a genuine shock to anyone knowledgeable about these sort of things if this were truly technically necessary. I'm emphasizing that what people on HN think of as "necessary" is different from what the government thinks of as "necessary". The example that I gave was that, if you don't have anyone on-call after hours (which is incredibly common), it makes sense to keep an important system offline during those hours, rather than risk a silent failure.