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IT experts question architecture of Obamacare website

11 points by arikrak 13y ago

micro-ram 13y ago
"the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov" I am speechless... No offense to our neighbors to the North, but we should have built that in the US. Maybe it's a way to shift more blame?
- gavingmiller 13y ago
  None taken :D -- it actually happens a lot up here too! My city routinely sends major projects to designers, architects, contractors, etc. outside of the city, province, and/or country. The likely culprit here is lowest bid != best product
gavingmiller 13y ago
Throwing some actual qualitative points on this grossly overstated article: it scored 92/100 on page speed [1], and 76/100 on YSlow [2]. Our companies site uses a mix of static/dynamic javascript which can cause as many as 100+ requests to be made and we're able to keep page load time < 2secs for the heaviest of pages. # of request doesn't automatically equal a slow website. Add the fact that this gov't site was likely mandated to support some ungodly old version of IE and you can easily see why there are so many js files. [1]: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_5J_T8/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_5J_T8/ [2]: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.healthcare.gov/1mQBgaqI http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.healthcare.gov/1mQBgaqI
zzzeek 13y ago
"IT experts analyze newly released Obamacare website and determine, 'this application is perfectly architected. we can find no flaws whatsoever. Kudos to the builders of this site for producing a flaw-free architecture on day one.'" very typical for a site that just launched three days ago!
shawn-furyan 13y ago
This strikes me as overblown piling on. The website seems to be working reasonably well now that the surge has died down a bit. I imagine that the website launched much more quickly than it would have if the developers had not used a bunch of javascript libraries. Now that the initial surge is over, the site likely will never see that kind of traffic again, and so the shortcut of using those libraries strikes me as a reasonable tradeoff. I'm sure their going through the process of pruning the unused code and adding caching. I don't really see what all the fuss is about. Also, anyone who launches to that kind of traffic is bound to have some launch day issues no matter how well they've designed the site.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
primigenus 13y ago
Developmentseed posted about exactly how and why they designed the architecture the way they have a few months ago: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launches-in-the-open/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launch... In summary: static website served via Jekyll and pushed into CDN, little to no content management outside of Prose.io, open source on Github, etc. These "IT experts" aren't impressed, huh? Well, this "IT expert" is. So they went down the first time they took a ridiculous traffic spike? So what? If it didn't go down under 8.6 million unique load I'd be suspicious.
arikrak 13y ago
It seems there were specific flaws in their approach that cannot be totally excused by large amounts of traffic: "Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems." Which means they may have been a little too triumphant back in June: "It's fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/health...

11 points by arikrak 13y ago

"the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov" I am speechless... No offense to our neighbors to the North, but we should have built that in the US. Maybe it's a way to shift more blame?

gavingmiller 13y ago
None taken :D -- it actually happens a lot up here too! My city routinely sends major projects to designers, architects, contractors, etc. outside of the city, province, and/or country. The likely culprit here is lowest bid != best product

gavingmiller 13y ago

Throwing some actual qualitative points on this grossly overstated article: it scored 92/100 on page speed [1], and 76/100 on YSlow [2]. Our companies site uses a mix of static/dynamic javascript which can cause as many as 100+ requests to be made and we're able to keep page load time < 2secs for the heaviest of pages. # of request doesn't automatically equal a slow website. Add the fact that this gov't site was likely mandated to support some ungodly old version of IE and you can easily see why there are so many js files. [1]: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_5J_T8/ http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_5J_T8/ [2]: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.healthcare.gov/1mQBgaqI http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.healthcare.gov/1mQBgaqI

zzzeek 13y ago

"IT experts analyze newly released Obamacare website and determine, 'this application is perfectly architected. we can find no flaws whatsoever. Kudos to the builders of this site for producing a flaw-free architecture on day one.'" very typical for a site that just launched three days ago!

shawn-furyan 13y ago

This strikes me as overblown piling on. The website seems to be working reasonably well now that the surge has died down a bit. I imagine that the website launched much more quickly than it would have if the developers had not used a bunch of javascript libraries. Now that the initial surge is over, the site likely will never see that kind of traffic again, and so the shortcut of using those libraries strikes me as a reasonable tradeoff. I'm sure their going through the process of pruning the unused code and adding caching. I don't really see what all the fuss is about. Also, anyone who launches to that kind of traffic is bound to have some launch day issues no matter how well they've designed the site.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

primigenus 13y ago

Developmentseed posted about exactly how and why they designed the architecture the way they have a few months ago: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launches-in-the-open/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/06/25/healthcare-launch... In summary: static website served via Jekyll and pushed into CDN, little to no content management outside of Prose.io, open source on Github, etc. These "IT experts" aren't impressed, huh? Well, this "IT expert" is. So they went down the first time they took a ridiculous traffic spike? So what? If it didn't go down under 8.6 million unique load I'd be suspicious.

arikrak 13y ago

It seems there were specific flaws in their approach that cannot be totally excused by large amounts of traffic: "Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems." Which means they may have been a little too triumphant back in June: "It's fast, built in static HTML, completely scalable and secure," said Bryan Sivak, chief technology officer of HHS, in an interview. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/healthcaregov-code-developed-by-the-people-and-for-the-people-released-back-to-the-people/277295/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/health...