News of The Damned

Today's Episode if brought to you by

* Foulk Consulting Services: https://www.foulkconsulting.com
* Catchpoint Software: https://www.catchpoint.com

Today’s show is co-hosted by Brian Brumfield (Foulk Consulting) and Nithyanand Mehta (Catchpoint), backed up with observations from Tim Western in Chat

We face continued interruptions in basic services due to the Cover-19 Pandemic. In this show we cover a few industry patterns

* Unemployment Insurance (Government) - We discuss user behaviors on a run on the bank model, the patterns of development and deployment that have lead to failures across states and countries

* Grocery Stores - This is a worldwide problem associated with delivery to consumer, especially where populations are under quarantine conditions and it is difficult to book a timeslot for delivery. While the architectural patterns for deployment are varied across the industry, there are some common issues associated with dynamic pages, cart allocation, session and whether the delivery system should be commingled with the cart system.

* General Government Information sites - NOCDN, Dynamic Web Pages, Hard Coupling for forms. How can these systems be revised for better performance in a short timeframe. Rather than tackle this at the site construction level we bring in alternatives on the web server front: IIS, Apache, nginx, Lighttpd, Cherokee, GWAN, plus varnish.

* https://howmuchtoiletpaper.com/ - It’s the thing everyone wants to know, do I have enough toilet paper to survive the quarantine period? And that is exactly what lead to the demise of the site. While they did do some things well, such as employ a CDN, they also engaged in practices to defeat the CDN benefits. Off the shelf also cost them an optimized performance path.