Every five years, Australians fill out census forms, and this year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Census of Population and Housing website, which cost about $10 million, was brought to its knees by the influx of visitors. The student website, however, used serverless architecture from Amazon Web Services to handle jumps in demand. Make Census Great Again was load tested to handle 4 million page views per hour, compared to the government’s load test of just 1 million page views per hour.
How much did it cost for university students to replicate the functionality of a $10 million census website run by the Australian Bureau of Statistics?
Answer: $500
According to the Daily Mail, two Australian university students designed a system during the Code Network Winter Hackathon capable of handling the traffic that took down the Australian government’s census page. The project, which the students called “Make Census Great Again,” performed at least four times better than the official website.
Every five years, Australians fill out census forms, and this year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Census of Population and Housing website, which cost about $10 million, was brought to its knees by the influx of visitors. The student website, however, used serverless architecture from Amazon Web Services to handle jumps in demand. Make Census Great Again was load tested to handle 4 million page views per hour, compared to the government’s load test of just 1 million page views per hour.
Every five years, Australians fill out census forms, and this year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Census of Population and Housing website, which cost about $10 million, was brought to its knees by the influx of visitors. The student website, however, used serverless architecture from Amazon Web Services to handle jumps in demand. Make Census Great Again was load tested to handle 4 million page views per hour, compared to the government’s load test of just 1 million page views per hour.
