They decided that the project should be located and built at the United States Postal Service, which would not only have a national database of valid addresses, but would eventually deliver the packages. When the Post Office CIO, Pritha Mehra, when learning about the project in December, she received an estimate that demand could peak at one million users per hour. Mehra, a 31-year veteran of service, concluded that was a low prediction and multiplied the number by 20, trying to achieve a safe margin of failure. “Think about it-Free Covid test“Look at how many people are trying to buy them,” she said. “Look at how many people are trying to buy them. And so we read 20 times the demand that was expected, and I told my team those are the ones. what we’re going to build.” She had no problem recruiting that team.
Mehra knew that would be a challenge for the service’s architecture, which involved a mix of its own data centers and external cloud providers. Her team established a system with triple redundancy, solidified the architecture, decoupled the customer experience process from order fulfillment, and cached data multiple times a day. this progress. And do endless load testing. “Believe me, there is a lot of work behind a website that seems so simple,” she said.
The entire project, from conception to soft launch on January 18 (one day earlier than announced), was completed in three weeks. The site itself was built by a relatively small team: three from USDS and about 15 from the Postal Service, a stark contrast to the wave of manpower the government has used to steer projects. such judgment. And it worked — a conclusion verified by the lack of outrage over its performance. External analysis indicates that more than 68 million people visited the site in the first week. More notably, at one point on the 18th, the site had 700,000 instant hits. By a great profit, this exceed all traffic on other government websites incorporated. Best of all: The government now says about 60 million people have ordered tests.
I was one of those visitors, and I was amazed how easily the postal service removed the admittedly low threshold for a successful exchange on the government website. I entered my name and address, and that was it. Within seconds, I received an email confirming my request.
Is the implementation perfect? Of course not. Some addresses did not register because they were listed as commercial buildings. The postal service told me it was in the case and was working on those issues. Also, there have been issues with response times at the phone number provided to those without web access. But don’t blame the experts for that!
Of course, signing up is only step one in actually getting the tests; Will Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s much criticized operate those tests to our homes? We’ll have to wait and see, but some people are reporting their package arrived even before the promised time of seven to 12 days.
