Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the requirements stage

Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by drakaal on Monday October 21, 2013 @12:35PM (#6586609)

I didn't see anything that meant it was doomed from the requirements stage.

This was more of an Obama love fest and defense of ObamaCare than a technical article describing who the backend was doomed.

For what this cost to build it could have been much better, much simpler, and handled the scale gracefully.

Yes privacy concerns keep it off the elastic cloud. (not a point mentioned in the article)

Yes authenticated users limit caching and make scaling harder. (not really mentioned)

But when you are talking about everyone in the US, you only have so many combinations. Income in something like 32 ranges, number of kids 1 through 12 (greater than 12 they are all free) a bunch of ages.

We just saw a post that only 15 searches are new to google each day, so the number of combinations is much less than search which does lots of caching.

The requirements were messed up, the implementation was. Clearly not built by people who had ever done "Facebook scale" stuff.

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Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by GVIrish on Monday October 21, 2013 @12:43PM (#6586647)

Well, some reports are that the requirements were changing until 1 week before launch, and that development didn't start until March of this year due to requirements delays. Just those two factors alone would doom just about any project of this scale.

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Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by twistedpair on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:57PM (#6587138)

They screwed the pooch, clearly. However I wouldn't assume that the insurance landscape is so simple. You're talking about an insurance industry and legal system that has had a fifty year head start making the process of insurance buying as complicated and obfuscated as possible.

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Re:Healthcare.gov crashing because backend doomed in the req... by coldcode on Monday October 21, 2013 @01:18PM (#6586861)

The primary contractor has had plenty of large gov projects including some for Medicare and SS. Of course so have all large consulting firms and they fail often as well. What the issue is isn't clear from random musings. Unless someone who worked on the project at a high enough level can explain all we have is guesswork.

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