We always love a “we could do it cheaper than the government” yarn, and we know that the complete failure of the census is of great interest to our readers. So the headline “How two Uni Students built a better census site in just 54 hours for $500” sounded like a cracker. So how do Austin Wiltshire and Bernd Harzer claim they have beaten IBM and the ABS at this census game? EFTM reports:
“The traditional approach to designing web services is ‘on-premise’ — this means that somewhere there are a bunch of computers all built to serve up the content — in this case, census forms. This is what IBM and the ABS did with the actual Census.
“But at the Code Network ‘winter hack-a-thon’ on the weekend, these two smart cookies went for a ‘cloud-first’ design which can quite simply ‘infinitely scale’.
“What this means is, you use a service like AWS (Amazon Web Services) and the software is built to simply grow, as load increases, it re-deploys itself to continually be able to cope with the demand.”
That’s enough for Ms Tips to understand, because putting everything on the cloud is supposed to fix everything, right? But Ms Tips’ grandpa says if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and the two students who took part in the Hackathon say that it would be expensive to protect their site from DDoS attacks, and make no mention of how secure the data entered into the cloud forms would be. We’re not sure where the cost of $500 comes from, but if that’s for 54 hours of work, we are worried that innovation won’t be adding much capital to the economy.
As a Crikey subscriber and someone who began working as a journalist in 1957, I am passionate about the importance of independent media like Crikey. I met a lot of Australians from many walks of life during my career and did my best to share their stories honestly and fairly with their fellow citizens.
And I never forgot how important it is to hold politicians to account. Crikey does that – something that is more important now than ever before in Australia.
Join us and save up to 50%
Subscribe before June 30 and choose what you pay for a year of Crikey. Save up to 50% or, chip in extra and get one of our limited edition Crikey merch packs.
Join Now
Leave a comment
You can look up AWS’s clients here –
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/all/
and take a wild guess at how critical it is for the business model of, say, Netflix or Spotify to have good load capacity and availability, or how important security might be to the WSJ or Capital One’s mobile banking.
I am sure their business is surely but a trifle next to a glorified customer survey with a one time use coupon though. And, of course, given the competence displayed in keeping the actual service available in the first place, there is no way there could ever be any issue with the ABS’s security or data handling – now, or at any point in the years they intend to fiddle with the data.
The best in the business. Not like that post you read about their IT setup over on somethingawful. Oh no.
be sure.
Look, you can do secure things on AWS. Absolutely. It’s one of the things I do for a living.
But, and this is the really important bit, you have to write it to be secure. You have to write it to meet the privacy expectations of people who are going to be using it. And if they knocked this thing up in 54 hours in a hackathon then it almost certainly doesn’t do any of that.
The more I think about the likely requirements spec for the census, just in terms of security and privacy, the more that project looks like a complicated and hairy job. Was it worth $10 million? Nah, probably not. Could it have been hosted on AWS instead of on SoftLayer? Absolutely, and it probably would’ve been cheaper on the hosting because holy crap have you looked at SoftLayer’s rates?
But if you contract IBM to do a job then they’re going to host it on SoftLayer, and it’s going to cost more than it probably should.