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by wyqydsyq 3601 days ago
Considering it was designed and hosted by IBM who are trying to recreate themselves as a primarily cloud PaaS company (see IBM BlueMix), I'd say it was a matter of IBM's engineers poorly configuring the scalability of the deployment, which I think also reflects poorly on their ability to service the cloud hosting market.

ABS shouldn't have outsourced the entire project to IBM, they could have just developed the application in-house and deployed it to an autoscaling CE instance group on Google Cloud, they probably would have saved $7-8 million paid to IBM while also avoiding this catastrophic failure.
3 comments
hhandoko 3601 days ago
I don't think the cloud and/or auto-scaling would help here. Most likely this is due to poor architecture choices.

Also, from what I can see, gov't departments normally outsource for projects and only ever retain staff for maintenance activities (i.e. keep the lights running). It's probably due to the way budgeting is done.

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cyphar 3601 days ago
It would almost certainly not be legal for them to host it on any servers owned by a private company. It's a national census, and they specifically are planning to store personally identifiable information for 4 years (imagine that I'm screaming the last sentence). Basically there's no way on earth it would be permitted for a government department to host the census collection on someone else's servers.
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jazoom 3601 days ago
GCE does not have an Australian data centre.
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