That's so cool! It really feels like tech best practices have made lots of headway in the past 5 years within the U.S. government. Looks like this analytics frontend was brought to us by 18F, with the codebase even hosted on GitHub[0]. Other governments in the US also seem to be using this like the city of Los Angeles[1].
Boy, a look at that site and you see why this was hosted by USPS - almost 200M hits to USPS properties in the last 7 days. I’d been tangentially aware of USPS’s pretty solid improvements to their digital architecture/offerings, but I didn’t realize they’d grown that much.
Given that essentially every American in the country interacts with USPS tangentially every day except Sundays, it seems reasonable. I get an email every day with an image of all mail coming to my mailbox, that probably counts when I open up the mail.
It's mostly people tracking their online shopping. Most small, lightweight packages that aren't delivered by Amazon are delivered by USPS. Lots of stores/receipts will link directly to the package's tracking page on USPS's site.
Why's the #3 most active city in the US listed as Graceville, a Florida village with a population of 2,153? Is that a VPN exit point for some large provider? Google isn't helpful.
I assume Ashburn traffic (#8) comes from AWS us-east-1.
edit: And another interesting thing, there are no EU countries in the geolocation table.
According to their documentation, DAP is built on-top of Google Analytics, and also IP Anonymization is enabled by default. As a Google Analytics power-user, I happen to know two relevants facts: 1) Geography is inferred from IP Address 2) IP Anonymization happens before geo look-ups.
So, what's probably happening is that some IP address in Graceville happens to end in the octect 0. And a bunch of other high-volume addresses, when you drop their last octect because of IP Anonymization, look like the IP address from Graceville.
As a more general note, the accuracy of geography reports in GA are suspect to begin with (Amazon and Google only agree at the state level about 75% of the time), and with IP Anonymization enabled it takes a substantial nosedive.
I was wondering the same thing. The town has a total population of like 2200. I can’t find any data centers near there. Maybe it’s just a flaw in their metrics.
I was looking at this yesterday too. Using USPS as the back end for COVIDtests.gov was particularly apt because (a) USPS is typically the US government website with the highest traffic and (b) verifying and storing addresses is their bread and butter.
I'm guessing some shady entrepreneur that has somehow compiled a bunch of unique shipping names and addresses to stockpile covid tests and try to sell them.
> But scalable web services are, in 2022, a commodity available to all.
A quick aside - I feel most folks on HN can say that they have been, in some way, shape, or form, a part of this journey for the industry. Take pride in being part of a community that has made this a possibility.
Is it power efficient to have 1 (small|medium|large) instance per workload? Or more realistically >=2 instances for redundancy.
No? Maybe we could get cost, energy and other efficiencies by aggregating disparate smaller and larger workloads over a system that scales up and down with demand, so every instance is processing X million TPS.
Cool idea. We could label that scalable, because it’s vastly more efficient!
Is there anything in the article or the supposed architecture that leads you to believe it is inefficient? Might we suspect that using multi-tenant cloud resources may take advantage of economies of scale and be quite efficient?
they don't get any pats on the back until we see the invoice. The original healthcare.gov was about $300m . I'm guessing this glamorous system had a similar budget.
Wed be better off letting people buy masks on amazon and deducting on their 1040
healthcare.gov launched before USDS was established. I would argue that part of the reason USDS exists is that fiasco which if I recall correctly was mostly CGI Federal.
Interesting thing: Some of the assets actually live on www.usps.com, like https://www.usps.com/assets/script/lib/jquery.special.js, which itself seems to be (based on the HTTP response headers) served from EdgeCast sitting in front of Azure.
It astonished me that the people who wrote the CDC covid tracker made it refuse Firefox visitors through User Agent checks. Mozilla had to add an intervention to spoof UA's, specifically on that site:
You're being downvoted, but you're right. I used to work in defense/intel, and then spent a lot of time at a large Federal consulting firm, where I learned just how insanely wasteful these agencies are on software projects. It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. The size of the teams on these projects is mind-boggling, and when you find out there's multiple managers for every developer, that's when your head will explode.
People on this site tend to think that any attack on the horrific spending efficiency of these agencies is motivated by an antipathy of the government in general, or a view that the government CAN'T do it right.
I'm not of that mind at all. My gripe is that the people who are most invested in expanding the government's role in the US for positive goals seem to have zero interest in even discussing the rot within these institutions that has crippled their ability to execute on the funding they already have. I can confidently assert that, if I'm being generous, 3/5s of the current Federal (and yes, contractors too!) work force is what my old chief called "furniture". I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).
I kind of agree, but I respect the fact that the site hasn't had any major issues while (presumably) millions of orders have flooded in over the last 24 hours. I can't remember the last product I pre-ordered, for example, that was that stable.
Engineers have long memories. Get some thing wrong once, and it'll take years to overcome. They need to stay perfect for 3 to 5 years before "heartening" becomes "normal".
It makes some sense that it would be that way. If a private company's web site doesn't work at all, then they don't get your money. There are incentives for them to get basic functionality right, and if they still screw it up they can be replaced by a competitor. If a government web site is completely broken, what can you do about it? Yell angrily at a passing cloud?
(In theory you could vote for a legislator who wants to make that web site a priority -- but nobody runs on that. Why would they? It would put most voters to sleep.)
How many other sites do you know that would go from 0 users to hundreds of millions within a few days? Even big studio games like Blizzard or Square Enix often struggle with release day, and those probably get a fraction of the users that something like this would, being blasted on all news platforms at once across the country.
The day used to be that "good enough for government work" was a compliment, an expression of the satisfaction that comes to a craftsman for doing work to high standards.
The feds had 2 years of pandemic to get it right. A bit late to launch but still glad to see resources getting out to individuals to help slow down the spread.
I wish it worked for me. My home has three separate addresses (it's a corner property), but USPS won't accept any of them. One it says is a commercial property and they won't deliver the COVID tests to there, and the other two it says don't exist. Despite the fact I get mail at all three addresses every day.
I can't leave my home to get a COVID test because I am on house arrest, so I guess I am just out of luck.
I don't know about OPs situation, but house arrest often allows for basic movement (groceries, court cases, etc). The list is strictly defined and the law may not allow for covid tests.
I live in a big commercial building which is very busy (I'm like the live-in, permanently-available supervisor - house arrest has its uses!). I don't want to give COVID to anyone. I had COVID in jail in March 2020 and it was horrid. I felt like I had it again, so I wanted to get tested.
I don't think that's a troll question, but I could imagine a situation where you're a high risk demographic you'd want to know early so you can get early treatment like monoclonal antibodies, paxlovid or ivermectin.
Have you talked to your local postmaster about this? This sounds like an issue they would be able to help resolve. No matter where I've lived, I've found them extremely helpful whenever I had to deal with them.
So, by default, where I live in Chicago you can't do anything at all. I was told by the Sheriff not to even leave my bedroom for any reason when I first got here. I live in a big commercial building, so I ignored their advice. I have an ankle monitor which uses GPS and cell network triangulation, so they know my rough position at all times. This means they knew I was wandering around, taking my dog for a walk around the building etc. The Sheriff would send people over constantly to harass me. I did a FOIA request to see their logs and it was funny to see that they have police constantly tagging my movements with quotes which basically say "Look, this guy isn't going anywhere, he is just walking around his building, we don't need to bother him" - but obviously there are dozens of different people working at the HQ and some aren't so kind.
I think it took over two months before I persuaded the judge to let me get groceries and go to the laundromat. So I have two hours on Mon/Tues/Thurs to get what I need. But I am supposed to go straight there and straight back.
There is a new law in Illinois which says I get two days a week to do what I want, but apparently because of poor coding in their computer system I can't get it because my jail ID ends in an odd number.
It is also a new law now that they can't charge you with "prison escape" for going outside your house unless you are gone for more than 48 hours. [people ended up with years in prison simply for taking their trash to the Dumpster behind their house]
tl;dr: I can now, after some hassle, get groceries. I cannot go to the doctor. When I needed my booster I timed the appointment so I could run into Walgreens on the way to the grocery store so they didn't notice I'd taken a detour. It might take me several months to get the judge to sign off on a doctor's appointment. If I'm dying I can go to the hospital, but I better have every scrap of paperwork and be willing to prove I was actually dying as I've known a couple of people who have ended up going back to jail after going to the hospital. [one guy took his daughter in an emergency - the judge told him he had no excuse for taking her as he could have just called an ambulance to take her and stayed at home]
As an aside, there was an interesting recent episode of the AWS FM podcast where a guest was rendering dynamic HTML from Lambda functions and seemed incredibly satisfied with the results. (Unfortunately the recent episodes lack transcripts and I cannot easily verify, but I think it was Episode 17 with Brian LeRoux.) This is a use case I haven't seen get a lot of love, but it is at least similar in premise to HTML Over the Wire [1].
> I suspect what’s happening from here is that API Gateway is in front of a Lambda function (indeed, this is a common design pattern that AWS documents) that does minimal-to-no processing of the JSON blob and puts it in a database, likely DynamoDB given the overall managed services flavor of this implementation. At that point, backend processes can take over...
A bit of an aside, but since this is an article about architecture, wouldn't the more common pattern here be APIGateway->Lambda->MessageQueue->BackendServices rather than APIGateway->Lambda->Database->BackendServices? Or does DynamoDB have something like a queue that backend processes can subscribe to? (Non-AWS user here).
Really either would work, depending on your specific use case. DynamoBD can emit an event stream based on writes/updates, which would be published to an SQS queue.
Readit News
0. https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov
1. http://analyticsdash-46.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Deleted Comment
I assume Ashburn traffic (#8) comes from AWS us-east-1.
edit: And another interesting thing, there are no EU countries in the geolocation table.
So, what's probably happening is that some IP address in Graceville happens to end in the octect 0. And a bunch of other high-volume addresses, when you drop their last octect because of IP Anonymization, look like the IP address from Graceville.
As a more general note, the accuracy of geography reports in GA are suspect to begin with (Amazon and Google only agree at the state level about 75% of the time), and with IP Anonymization enabled it takes a substantial nosedive.
A quick aside - I feel most folks on HN can say that they have been, in some way, shape, or form, a part of this journey for the industry. Take pride in being part of a community that has made this a possibility.
Until we measure our services in transactions / kW, things will continue to get more redundant.
Hopefully it'll catch on more, and encourage the use of productive AND efficient approaches.
No? Maybe we could get cost, energy and other efficiencies by aggregating disparate smaller and larger workloads over a system that scales up and down with demand, so every instance is processing X million TPS.
Cool idea. We could label that scalable, because it’s vastly more efficient!
https://special.usps.com/testkits
without submitting anything, it returns this error code:
QWNjZXNzIG1haW4gcHJvZ3JhbS4gQWNjZXNzIG1haW4gc2VjdXJpdHkuIEFjY2VzcyBtYWluIHByb2dyYW0gZ3JpZC4
which base64 translates to: "Access main program. Access main security. Access main program grid."
Which is a JURASSIC PARK reference: https://jurassicsystems.com/
Wed be better off letting people buy masks on amazon and deducting on their 1040
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/#prici...
It is amazing that every single thing I've read said more or less the same thing.
{ "error": "QWNjZXNzIG1haW4gcHJvZ3JhbS4gQWNjZXNzIG1haW4gc2VjdXJpdHkuIEFjY2VzcyBtYWluIHByb2dyYW0gZ3JpZC4=" }
Alrighty then.
But how lame to give such an opaque error to so many people.
To further the learning, can anyone guess which part of the stack is likely generating the error?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1719846 ("Bug 1719846: Add UA override for https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/")
People on this site tend to think that any attack on the horrific spending efficiency of these agencies is motivated by an antipathy of the government in general, or a view that the government CAN'T do it right.
I'm not of that mind at all. My gripe is that the people who are most invested in expanding the government's role in the US for positive goals seem to have zero interest in even discussing the rot within these institutions that has crippled their ability to execute on the funding they already have. I can confidently assert that, if I'm being generous, 3/5s of the current Federal (and yes, contractors too!) work force is what my old chief called "furniture". I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated).
(In theory you could vote for a legislator who wants to make that web site a priority -- but nobody runs on that. Why would they? It would put most voters to sleep.)
Deleted Comment
I can't leave my home to get a COVID test because I am on house arrest, so I guess I am just out of luck.
So, by default, where I live in Chicago you can't do anything at all. I was told by the Sheriff not to even leave my bedroom for any reason when I first got here. I live in a big commercial building, so I ignored their advice. I have an ankle monitor which uses GPS and cell network triangulation, so they know my rough position at all times. This means they knew I was wandering around, taking my dog for a walk around the building etc. The Sheriff would send people over constantly to harass me. I did a FOIA request to see their logs and it was funny to see that they have police constantly tagging my movements with quotes which basically say "Look, this guy isn't going anywhere, he is just walking around his building, we don't need to bother him" - but obviously there are dozens of different people working at the HQ and some aren't so kind.
I think it took over two months before I persuaded the judge to let me get groceries and go to the laundromat. So I have two hours on Mon/Tues/Thurs to get what I need. But I am supposed to go straight there and straight back.
There is a new law in Illinois which says I get two days a week to do what I want, but apparently because of poor coding in their computer system I can't get it because my jail ID ends in an odd number.
It is also a new law now that they can't charge you with "prison escape" for going outside your house unless you are gone for more than 48 hours. [people ended up with years in prison simply for taking their trash to the Dumpster behind their house]
tl;dr: I can now, after some hassle, get groceries. I cannot go to the doctor. When I needed my booster I timed the appointment so I could run into Walgreens on the way to the grocery store so they didn't notice I'd taken a detour. It might take me several months to get the judge to sign off on a doctor's appointment. If I'm dying I can go to the hospital, but I better have every scrap of paperwork and be willing to prove I was actually dying as I've known a couple of people who have ended up going back to jail after going to the hospital. [one guy took his daughter in an emergency - the judge told him he had no excuse for taking her as he could have just called an ambulance to take her and stayed at home]
Deleted Comment
I'm sorry this isn't working for you. I've had luck ordering them on amazon though.
S3 is nasty expensive for outbound bandwidth. I’m surprised the usps landing page is there. No reason that couldn’t have been on lambda as well.
[1]: https://hotwired.dev/
A bit of an aside, but since this is an article about architecture, wouldn't the more common pattern here be APIGateway->Lambda->MessageQueue->BackendServices rather than APIGateway->Lambda->Database->BackendServices? Or does DynamoDB have something like a queue that backend processes can subscribe to? (Non-AWS user here).
0: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg... 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerg...