NOTD for Sunday March 29 2020 - The Collapse of Basic Services

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News of The Damned

NOTD for Sunday March 29 2020 - The Collapse of Basic Services

Mar 29, 2020 · 1h 27m 7s

Today's Episode if brought to you by

* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.com
* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.com

Today’s show is co-hosted by Brian Brumfield (Foulk Consulting) and Nithyanand Mehta (Catchpoint), backed up with observations from Tim Western in Chat

We face continued interruptions in basic services due to the Cover-19 Pandemic. In this show we cover a few industry patterns

* Unemployment Insurance (Government) - We discuss user behaviors on a run on the bank model, the patterns of development and deployment that have lead to failures across states and countries

* Grocery Stores - This is a worldwide problem associated with delivery to consumer, especially where populations are under quarantine conditions and it is difficult to book a timeslot for delivery. While the architectural patterns for deployment are varied across the industry, there are some common issues associated with dynamic pages, cart allocation, session and whether the delivery system should be commingled with the cart system.

* General Government Information sites - NOCDN, Dynamic Web Pages, Hard Coupling for forms. How can these systems be revised for better performance in a short timeframe. Rather than tackle this at the site construction level we bring in alternatives on the web server front: IIS, Apache, nginx, Lighttpd, Cherokee, GWAN, plus varnish.

* https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com/ - It’s the thing everyone wants to know, do I have enough toilet paper to survive the quarantine period? And that is exactly what lead to the demise of the site. While they did do some things well, such as employ a CDN, they also engaged in practices to defeat the CDN benefits. Off the shelf also cost them an optimized performance path.

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Comments

Timothy Western

4 years ago

On asking questions. Or maybe people are asking questions, but are rebuffed saying 'its not a priority', or 'we don't have time' or 'we don't have budget'. I wouldn't paint with too broad a brush, but people with a performance mindset can be hampered by heavy handed management practices I think.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

I wonder how, VPN usage on companies is handling. Some companies have had VPn for a long time, others only a small subset of users have had it and IT shops may have had to scramble to 'get more licenses', add more infrastructure to handle things.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

Some of the shopping websites have oddities. Kroger's click list has a button to add to cart and another button that you can increment, but it snot for the cart, really confusing.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

ah grocery stores. More people going online: Online Inventory not correct, causing issues. I've seen Kroger and Walmart both with issues. Sometimes I create a shopping list hit cart and like , wait its not there, or it goes down for a bit.... or if I do get the cart, the pickup or delivery slots aren't available until AFTER the list is created. We need mkore sites to do like Grove.co that announces that shipments are delayed right on the front page so people know before they spend an hour building a list and then losing it.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

How about some positivity though? Have you seen state, county, municipal groups working together to make their messaging and sites easier to get updates, so that no one site or organization has to shoulder the load? I know I have, and I think it has helped. Not sure if other counties or states are leveraging this idea as part of their emergency event planning and communication strategies.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

One other factor, as more people at home, there is one sector that is probably taking advantage of people being away from the office.... Cybercriminals. How much of the internet traffic is criminal or government sponsored attacks and botnets, also causing problems?

Timothy Western

4 years ago

I think part of the problem are state and local governments also are battling differences of understanding of what IT is for their services or how essential their services are. I think many localities are forward thinking, but hamstrung not just by budget priorities, but outdated thinking on how everything in Government runs on software, networks, and devices.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

oh yeah let's talk about News sites, and by news sites I include big news like the Associated Press, CNN, CBS, Sky News etc, but also every government and business entity that posts news to their sites, now falls into this. So when local News Site goes out, when their stream times out and you miss part of key government announcements you are then compounding the problem as people refresh, try again, load other tabs/browsers etc, to try and follow. I'm thankful that the Virginia State Governor has moved a lot of this load directly to youtube, and haven't seen quite as many problems since. But local NewsPaper and News stations often do not have CDNs at all. And in the case of one paper, that I won't name, their help is a third party, that is undeliverable via email. FUN.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

So: Run on Bank + Shared infrastructure + longer time to complete forms, errors causing increasing slow downs, and who knows whether the gov't systems impacted share networks with other servers or have their own thing. The only thing more funny, are those with cloud services, who suddenly find the bottle neck at there identity access point (firewall, remote proxy, on site active directory, whatever.) Many businesses do not even have experience with lots of a remote workers on top of it, so you have them doing these forms over the encrypted VPN then out to certain sites, its no surprise that things are ... slow.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

For example: You might have cable service to your home at 25 MBPS, but now you are competing with everyone else in your neighborhood who are 'hitting the same sites', along side, kids trying to watch you tube videos for google classroom, then older people streaming video, or gaming. All increased over normal bandwidth needs during the day, and many don't realzie how bad rural broadband is until they experience it first hand.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

Run on the bank? Yes, but also, the form collection is labor intesnive, lots of pages, screens, things stored in session or cookies, and on top of it, many of these people may live in areas where the bandwidth they have at home is not what it should be.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

You know its a pretty serious crash (unemployment websites) when even local news has whole segments devoted to it.

Timothy Western

4 years ago

I made it yae!

Information

Author	PerfBytes
Website	-
Tags	#cachepolicy #catchpoint #cdn #cherokee #covid19 #drupal #dynatrace #foulkconsulting #gwan #joomla #lighttpd #nginx #performance #supermarkets #unemploymentinsurance #varnish #wordpress

NOTD for Sunday March 29 2020 - The Collapse of Basic Services

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