On the very first day that suppressors and short-barreled shotguns became tax-free, the ATF’s eForms system crashed for hours under overwhelming demand. For the first time in nearly a century, Americans were able to exercise this right without paying a $200 federal tax—yet the system meant to process those applications couldn’t handle the volume. [More]
For some reason I’m recalling the old Panasonic slogan and imagining a modification:
[Via Jess]
I design and build very very large “cloud computing” systems for a living. I hold AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional and several other credentials. I have designed, built, and run services that automatically scale up to withstand Black Friday, and day-of-release surges for streaming media properties, then shrink their capacity back down to be cost-efficient when the load subsides and stabilizes over the long term. They’re designed to perform well when traffic is measured in millions of transactions per minute.
These systems aren’t just a well endowed tower PC under some guy’s desk. They’re well engineered distributed deployments of common, mature technologies for load balancing, web service, business logic, and databases.
If the NFA form processing system can’t handle a paltry few hundred thousand customers spread over several days, that means it was poorly designed, and its users are the victims of poor planning. The decision makers either chose not to prepare for the load, or they hired the wrong people to do it.
From the point of view of another software professional (retired) I agree 100%. Especially since the surge in volume and the time period of the increase were entirely predictable. The event amounted to what one of my former bosses referred to as a “planned emergency.”
If BATFE had planned to inconvenience as many of their “customers” as possible, how would they have done this any differently?