Why Netflix or Zoom is Impossible to Crash ?
Some of the government's most vital websites are crashing once we need them the foremost . More than 22 million people have filed for unemployment in the last year, an unprecedented number driven by the global coronavirus outbreak.
Websites crash and USA.
Now Government has put aside an extra 250 billion dollars in USA to handle the new applicants, but as people go to the state level systems to file, a lot of those websites are just timing out. - Some say that applying for unemployment benefits is nearly impossible. - The state computing system has some trouble. - They need to fix the website.
Why Netflix or Zoom Cannot be Crashed?
This isn't how the internet usual works. Services like Netflix and Zoom have seen an enormous surge in traffic too, but apart from a couple of hiccups, you'd never know the difference. Most software engineers plan to be able to handle ten times the regular traffic without breaking a sweat. But government systems don't work that way. And it's surprisingly hard to shift them over.
Websites and COBOL.
A lot of that is because of the backend programming, most of which is written in a coding language called COBOL that dates all the way back to the 50s. But to understand why they're still using COBOL and why it's such a problem, you have to see how these sites were originally built. And more importantly, you have to sneak at the big picture.
Story of COBOL
The story of COBOL started in 1959, long time before personal computers or the internet. A corporation or university might have a computer network, but you were really only going to run programs within your specific system. So each network developed slightly different rules and it became really hard to transfer programs or data from one network to a different . So a group of engineers started working on a common programming language that could help those networks and be the main language for businesses going in the future. They whoop it the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL. By the late 70s, COBOL was the standard Programing Language.
Websites and Database.
If you were managing an enormous database system, you wrote all of your code in COBOL. And that dominance is a huge part of why people still use it today. This is by no means a dead language. It's something that certainly millions, possibly billions of monetary transactions believe COBOL on a day to day.
Websites and Internet Crash.
When the web happened, you suddenly had to stress about keeping your service running within the face of giant shifts in usage and constant code updates. That meant treating your servers during a completely different way. When you've 50 servers running, it doesn't matter if one among them goes down. You just usher in another one and you create sure they're all so dumb and interchangeable that you simply can cycle them in and out without anyone noticing.
You don't train them, you just herd them. And because these are global web services, that also means you can distribute your herd all around the world, scaling up or down depending on how many people are visiting the site that morning. With cloud hosts like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, you do not even got to buy an entire server. You can just rent one-hundredth of a server for a couple of hours, just to form it through that morning's spike in demand.
Websites and Services.
Name any online service that's launched within the last 20 years. They basically all work on the cattle model. That means many basically disposable servers cycling in and out. But tons of those state unemployment systems are running continuously for 40 years, processing thousands of applications hebdomadally , all on COBOL. They never switched over to disposable servers. Which makes it hard to process the type of traffic surge that YouTube of Netflix would absorb stride.
The language is old and some of the people still fluent in it are even older, with many approaching retirement age. This has become a recipe for disaster in states that also operate under COBOL. Governors like New Jersey's Phil Murphy have involved programmers to return out of retirement to assist maintain their overwhelmed systems.
You cannot really move/Copy paste a COBOL program to the Amazon Web Services cloud. So it just sits there getting older and a touch harder to take care of annually . Programmers called this technical debt. And if you are not pocket money on upgrades per annum , it piles up fast. - For more than 10 years, the federal government has been pressuring state Medicaid programs to update their aging systems.
Before these folks gets retired, many of them had been fired. And then they'd actually been brought back in in crisis moments to repair and upgrade the COBOL systems, which ideally they ought to have just been kept on to take care of the entire time.
The real problem is, we just haven't been pocket money maintaining these systems. We haven not wanted to or we thought we could skate by without it. And then when many people suddenly need unemployment checks, the whole system is buried in technical debt. It's a hard lesson, but if we would like the reliability that we expect from web services, we're gonna need to buy it.
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