[viraptor]

> scalable ways to host a web form

That's the trivial part. You seem to imply ABS spent 5 years doing just the web form and that's a false premise just there. Once they match the privacy requirements you can read about here:

http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310114.nsf/4a256353001af3...

Let me know how much time it took them (including getting security clearance to do it, all the post-processing, hardware management, etc.)

[Hbthegreat]

While I agree with this sentiment if they are doing all of the post processing and data operations in band and not off in separate queues then the architecture was wrong to begin with. Collect data => add to queue => process later. It doesn't matter how long that process later step takes as people only care about being able to submit their census and their government not looking like a laughing stock.

This exercise is about performance not things like security clearances.

[viraptor]

If the exercise was about performance, they could just point at google forms. They didn't. You said:

> The purpose was to show that it can be done better and cheaper than what IBM and the Australian Government came up with in FIVE years vs 2 students in 24ish hours.

Neither did ABS spend 5 years on the webform, nor the guys implemented everything that IBM and ABS did in 24h. They did something completely different. These guys got to skip all of the complexity of the solution and did the easy part in a weekend. You're also presenting the easy parts only. Even "add to queue => process later" is easy only if you want to show notification on a small site. Add all the assurances you need for the census and it's a multi-day task on its own.

Basically we're reliving the times of "why is Twitter going down all the time, I implemented Twitter in RoR in a weekend, look"