Daughters black bear hunt canceled

[caddisguy]

What your friend was beating around the bush about is the damned FOIPPA that kills all cloud services and hosted services in BC. I work for the gov in the IT industry and its a massive pain in the ass that we cannot use a lot of well used services because of our BC FOIPPA laws. We have apps we cannot use, websites, services ..... the list goes on. All in the name of protecting user (BC residents) data.

It sounds like that rules out some good cloud services like AWS or Azure (even though with AWS has Regions in Canada) but it is still entirely possible to roll out quality infrastructure in Canada.

I have rolled out infrastructure for BC government projects (that house private data) in local DC's here in Vancouver, both dedicated hardware and virtualized/cloud environments.

The thing that really bothers me is that there are only around 100000 hunters in BC. I suspect there are only 30000 or so that apply for LEH.

Let's say maybe 1/3 wait until the last day. This means the infrastructure needs to handle 10000 sessions in perhaps a few hours. Even with a presumably bloated application (I would bet money it is on the sloppy side but I am sure I have seen worse too) 10k sessions over the course of an evening seems like a "worst case scenario" yet I would consider this fairly light usage.

While it could probably be done on one server hosting both the web server and DB, $1500-$2000 month or so should get you a redundant pair of load balancers that double as firewalls, 2-3 decent web servers and a 2-3 db servers. And if they really want to penny pinch to make the most of our money, since the resources would be less than 1% used 90% of the year, they could certainly use the hardware for other projects. It would make the most sense for the BC government to build out their own VPC's so they have the ability to shift resources from one project to another based on demand but still have separate VM's for each project. I imagine right now they have environments all over the place with so many redundant (as in unnecessary) systems that are sitting around 99% idle.

There are so many options available to run a relatively small site without it falling over during moderate usage. Any further back in technology and they'd have dang GeoCities hit counter on there

To put it in perspective, I have a 15+ year old opteron sitting in a Colo room that runs a website, mail server, db server, monitoring system among other things. The site is actually a front-end for a BBS era online game that runs out of a DOS emulator. It was posted on Slashdot a few years ago and had a few hundred thousand sessions in a short period of time and hundreds of people playing a game in a dos emulator running under Linux with a perl based authentication system. I hardly noticed a load spike let alone resource saturation. And that is hardware so old you probably couldn't even give it away.

[Krico]

I can’t believe how complicated and inefficient they’ve made licensing now. Went through the bs of having to scan and submit “credentials” for my 12 year old son’s youth license this spring. System said it was going to take up to a week to certify. What a joke. Luckily I was able to get in to a service B.C. office and had somebody straighten it out.
The fact our tags bought online are now mailed, with no option to have an electronic copy added to Apple wallet or something similar is also ridiculous.
One step forward 2 back.
I totally agree with Deaddog.
Guys can preach all they want about planning, buying early etc but the point is going electronic was supposed to make things faster and easier, not slower and more difficult.
Getting invited last minute Friday afternoon to go on an unplanned weekend hunt in past meant swinging by the gas station and grabbing tags needed on way. Now it’ll mean saying no I have to wait for the government to mail my tag I have to buy online tonight.