Why unemployment sites crash but Netflix doesn’t
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State unemployment insurance systems are getting crushed by a flood of applicants, cutting off people at the worst possible time. But why can’t those systems scale up like Netflix or Zoom? Figuring out the answer means diving deep into the way those systems were coded, and the mixed blessing of COBOL.
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#unemployment #sites #crash #Netflix #doesnt
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Mortals out there: “Is JuSt A wEbPaGe!”
Damn whoelse codes in COBOL these days?
It’s called sense of priorities
五毛
Not sure what box this guy came out of, but all the Government sites I’ve worked on were not written in Cobol. They just didn’t have the hardware infrastructure setup right. Lowest bidder issues.
Most of these are excuses. The websites ARE NOT RUNNING COBOL. They are supposed to be collecting data that then gets spoon-fed to the COBOL-running mainframes in a neat queue.
TLDR: COBOL may be the reason your cheque is late, but NOT that the site crashes.
Who maintains their codebase in COBOL in 2020?
Ignore technical debt at your peril — I’ve worked on many systems where technical debt was never addressed. You can pay for it now, or later. Sadly most companies and government never address it until their backs are against the wall and have no choice but to deal with it. This isn’t an issue with COBOL (or any language by itself), but neglect and the lack of upgrading and developing scalable systems that can handle the increased loads.
In conclusion, they just can’t be bothered.
Bruh states are too cheap when it comes to the government computer system. I’m a programmer btw.….
Encouraging that our governments are so far behind and can’t get their act together.
Who classified the United States a developed country?
I tell you what.. even modern upgrades can have the same issues… I know of companies trying to move off their legacy system to a modern solution and it’s a huge train wreck… it’s extremely complex.… god i hate software..
wow, I always wondered why that happened, thank you for the explanation
I don’t know whether Indiana’s online unemployment system depends on Cobol or not, but I’ve never seen it crash, and it works pretty damn good !
‘Cobol’ is not the issue; compile with gnu cobol for x86. This isn’t even oversimplified, it’s just watery. The entire infrastructure is the issue. The government isnt the one which needs to handle the hosting. There is nothing wrong with COBOL, other than expressiveness, it doesn’t ‘force you to treat your servers like pets’. The issue is hardware, not software. Anyone could write a COBOL compiler for any architecture for any reason and artificially break the language’s specfication to allow interop with os/firmware.
Good high level explanation. It bears mentioning that it’s far easier generally for private enterprise to hop on a public cloud provider and scale out vs. the government, which is under more scrutiny from both a sensitive-data standpoint and a tax-dollar-appropriation standpoint.
The bottom line is they haven’t spent the money to fix it. The answer to the titular question, Why unemployment sites crash but Netflix doesn’t, is more basic. Netfix makes money on it’s web services, the unemployment sites, and gov in general, do not. Beyond that, the government must answer to many people who don’t care, when they want to upgrade services. Netfilix must answer to many people who do care, if they don’t upgrade their services.
Explained very well
Really interesting. Thanks!
First time I heard of cobol programming language
Netflix has current engineers and they use flexible cloud computing via AWS to be able to cope with massive floods of data