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Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

thedoctorweighsin.com

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Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#41

Post by danielweber »

thejerz wrote: post #11
patrickg_zill wrote: post #5

A friend analyzed the page and noted that they didn't minify or combine anything. "One obvious reason is that they're serving unminified and unconcatenated Javascript and CSS files. A single page load causes 92 requests to the server, and they're not using a CDN for any of that. They're also not setting the Cache-Control and Expires headers, so the browser isn't caching many of those files, including on 80k file full…

While that is an egregious amount of requests, it's not the reason the site is broken. Based on my experience as a user and poking around quickly in Firebug, the issues are largely server-side.

Yeah, people bitch about client-side because it's what they can see. But they are mostly just dumb inefficiencies that are easily fixed. (And if you were doing a sane rollout, you wouldn't be worrying about this stuff because you only have 10K users at once. Save the minifying for later.)

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#42

Post by joering2 »

dm2 wrote: post #23
nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Seriously, that number is staggering. CGI Federal literally ripped off the government, screwed the American people badly, and "stole" hundreds of millions. They should never be allowed to work on another project again and should be required to refund the government. The project managers should be fired and publicly humiliated. I STILL cannot even login to the website. The site has said "The system is down at the mome…

> The only reasonable explanation I can imagine is sabotage by someone who didn't want Obamacare to succeed

It depends how you define "success". While most people assume success as a well-oiled healthcare machine that is affordable and cares about you then yes, they have failed. However, if you have done your homework on Obama and Democratic party (in biggest part), you will understand that they already greatly succeed - that is they shoved a huge tax (that over 10 years grow to 10% of your income, starting with 1% next year) in american's throat. While congress pass the law and Supreme Court upheld it, rest is just a statistic noise. Who care congress has 11% approval? Who care Obama has vanishing approval rate and his administration cannot catch up with any "phoney" scandals they getting into every month it seems? Its all irrelevant. After all, they did not hire 16,000 new physicians; they hired 16,000 new IRS workers that will be responsible for collecting what you lawfully owe. That's all! Its all about the taxes; its never been about you or your health. The only way Obama ACA would be more successful is that every single american throw a towel and say "screw it, I will pay the fine, this is too complicated!". That would be the best scenario for the Obama and the gov.

> the same thing that happened in Congress recently.

I think you mean the shutdown. It was so pathethic that it is funny. Imagine situation when you drive to work every day. And then every weekend you go out and drink and drive. The cop pulled you over twice but he let you go with a warning. You keep drinking and driving. Then one day he pulled you over, boom! DUI, license revoked. Then you go to your friends and family and you complain that because of this cop now you cannot do your work, because you drove to the office every day. If you agree with this reasoning then yes Reps were responsible for shutting down the Gov and not letting Congress do their work.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#43

Post by Iftheshoefits »

newsreader wrote: post #32
icn2 wrote: post #19

At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.

Amen to that. This thread and all others that mention the healthcare.gov debacle would go on forever talking about MS and ignoring the fundamental issues of bad architecture and government waste.

It's not just government waste. The private, for-profit companies that are awarded these contracts are part of the problem. It's not like "government waste" is even the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is the private companies involved in this. Not the government. Although all parties deserve some blame, for sure, because they have a "scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" approach.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#44

Post by neurotixz »

The web part is just a tiy part of a major project. Extracting informations from 55 databases/unrelated systems in a coherent manner is a nightmare by definition.

The number of different 3rd party libraries that are required, the type incompatibilities, matching fields, accounting for changes in the schema, and talking to legacy systems (I am sure there are many of them in there...), all in 5 months? Good luck.

Add to this the overhead of talking to IT and management of insurance companies, the IRS and others, and just the fact that it does answer some queries is fairly impressive in my book.

Also I am sure that most of those systems are failry deep inside the corporate networks of these insurers, just getting access to them probably was not an easy task.

That said the authentication layers failures and lack of testing are far from impressive.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#45

Post by pan69 »

31reasons wrote: post #31
nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

If you hire 10 web developers fulltime for 2 years, it would come down to ~$7000 hourly rate per developer.

10 web developers couldn't even remotely come close to building/implementing a system like this. This is not a web development project but an enterprise integration project. What you see as "the website" is just the tip of the ice berg. It's like saying that a car is just a steering wheel and four wheels because that's all you "see" but you don't know what's going on "under the hood".

However, I do agree that the costs for this are extravagant and there are certainly signs of "government milking" visible here.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#46

Post by spoiledtechie »

nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Thats just the contract cost.... Numbers are estimated near $340M and the GAO just came out with current costs sitting at $320M but harder liners are coming out with numbers near $620M. By the time its done and fixed, its estimated at $1B.

Put that in your head...

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#47

Post by ddoolin »

segmondy wrote: post #34
nathas wrote: post #2

$293M.... I'm just consistently angry over how much this cost. There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website. Christ.

Sorry, but you obviously have no idea what you are talking about when you call it, "a website" Or is google just a website? Is yahoo.com just a website? Did you look at the infograph? How much do you think it will take to talk to 5 agencies and 300 insurance providers that have 4500+ health plans, and get them to agree/adhere, understand their EXISTING system and build a site? I'm not justifying the expense, but let'…

Presumably the interfacing with insurance providers is done on the backend (not included in the $295M). It's possible that QSSI took all the content from the providers and standardized it for display in the front, near trivializing what you mention. Just a hunch, and not saying it isn't complex, just not $295M complex.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#48

Post by spikels »

daigoba66 wrote: post #39
ryanobjc wrote: post #29

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project. While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close. Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module c…

Given the complexity of the system, the most shocking thing to me is that how little time they had to actually build it. And from what's been made public there was virtually no time for testing (load testing was certainly absent). It should been "turned on" months before the public go-live to iron out all of these issues.

That's one thing I never understood. The law was passed 3.5 years before they had to go live. Seems like they should have had plenty of time but it seems like almost all of the coding was done in the past year with little testing along the way.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#49

Post by AaronFriel »

ryanobjc wrote: post #29

People appear to be missing the point that _the website_ is literally the smallest part of the project. While it's easy for people to crap on things like js-minifying, cache control, etc - the hard reality is the stuff that is the hardest is so hard that most people have never done anything even remotely close. Having worked on 10m+ loc codebases, life gets very hard. Dynamic languages tend to be unworkable. Module c…

Taking on EDI projects are the the most difficult jobs I've had as a dev or as an admin. Interacting with someone else's database schema is like trying to put yourself in its designer's head, and it's on a good day when you have a standard protocol or database format. I've mostly worked in the auto-industry as end-user support and currently employed by a wholesaler - the connection between parts manufacturers overseas and dealerships, body shops and others. The business is more complicated than that, but the auto industry is one with many standards, lots of vendor lock in, and proprietary formats and coding schemes for everything.

With EDI you don't get to dictate standards, you can't demand JSON/web interfaces, you usually have to deal with flat text files (good luck) or schemaless XML (you're doomed) if that. Some vendors just provide XLS files to an FTP endpoint and call it a day. Some vendors send pricing information exclusively in PDF format over email. The manufacturers never maintain a format for more than a month, and downstream consumers of data can never decide how they want it.

Finally, you'd think that once you get all of that mess sorted out you're golden. The only problem is that the auto industry is the land that time and UPC codes forgot, and there are multiple inconsistent standards for labeling parts, and data services that claim to have a mapping between them are selling snake oil at prices several orders of magnitude higher than what you'd think fair.

Also no one in this industry believes in using software developed in the last ten years and I think I'll be near retirement age before my successors will first receive vendor data in JSON over HTTP/1.0.

Re: Healthcare.gov technology stack (infographic)

#50

Post by snowwrestler »

usaphp wrote: post #20

$293Mln...Ok so it's like hiring a team of 100 web developers, pay each of them $100K a year, and they will work non-stop for 30 years... Edit: Working non stop for 30 years.

The project almost certainly had thousands (multiple) working on it.
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