Uni students built a proper census site for $500 in 54hrs :)

Innovative Queensland uni students

Abbott/Turnbull gov innovation

They also load tested it for free to 4 million views an hour/10 thousand submissions per second. It cost the gov half a million $ to load test their site to 1 million views per hour.

How did they do this. Well unlike the Abbott/Turnbull gov they had this innovation thing happening. They used cloud technology that basicaaly can expand with demand to infinity. 

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. 

They built the site, and even “load tested” it – remember the ABS spent almost half-a-million dollars on Load testing their failed site? In addition to the $9.6million to design and build it? 

On the weekend “Make Census Great Again” was load tested to 4 million page views per hour. And 10,000 submissions per second – insane numbers. 

The ABS proposed and tested their site for 1 million per hour. The magic “260 submissions per second” they keep banging on about. Their testing? $469,000. Testing for “Make Census Great Again” – $0. 

That’s right, there are open source (ie: Free) load testing solutions out there, which – ironically, were also designed in just two days like this very project. EFTM