Re Sunday Hours: Obamacare Website To Be Shut Down For Portion of Most Weekends
As a software engineer, I can tell you that no modern web site that serves as much traffic as healthcare.gov requires multiple 12-hour windows for maintenance. Most sites of that size maintain “copies” of their code on multiple servers to prevent service outages when hardware fails. When developers need to push new code out, they’ll often perform rolling deployments whereby only a fraction of the servers are taken down at one time. This ensures that the site remains available for all users during upgrades and other code deployments.
Please! contact your representatives and demand that Tom Price’s HHS account for a) why complete service outages are necessary and b) the work they are going to accomplish during open enrollment that they can’t perform now, ahead of healthcare.gov’s busiest time of year.