ONS publishes technical learnings of UK’s first online census

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has outlined the technical learnings of the UK’s first census delivered absolutely online.

Based fully on the ONS doc, uptake of the digital census was high, with 97% of households in England, Wales and Northern Ireland participating. Some 22 million census responses were purchased between February and June 2021 through an web electronic questionnaire (eQ).

Some 19 million person sessions were recorded by the Census 2021 questionnaire. As a outcome of the counts were recorded through Google Analytics cookies, the ONS estimated that the person sessions and web page views were a glorious deal better, at potentially round 3.3 billion.

The high demand experienced by the ONS for the census – with virtually nine in 10 households finishing it online in a short period of time and beautiful under half a million submissions purchased per hour on the head of the period – were met throughout the usage of cloud architecture.

Some 468 cases of the eQ application were in use to govern the high levels of demand, each and every with one Docker container. The ONS workforce selected now to now not make use of vehicle scaling because of the the doubtless creation of latency and the impact on customers. In total, 885 containers were provisioned with a additional 225 reserved in case of need.

Based fully on the ONS doc on the digital census skills, the eQ product served 5.8 billion HTTP requests everywhere in the five-month period. A complete of 1,097 HTTP errors arose. Here’s the identical to a 0.00001862% error rate, and there bask in been no HTTP errors on Census Day.

Dwell service dangers had to be managed everywhere in the expected Census Day top. Based fully on the doc, a flatter usage curve would be preferred to stabilise machine demand and withhold faraway from peaks. On the opposite hand, the Census Day top was predictable and the ONS workforce was ready to prepare for it with the flexibility of the cloud-based mostly architecture and infrastructure, apart from to the power to scale that setup if required.

The ONS pointed out that the success of the digital census demonstrates that “remarkable government digital services and products could perhaps be securely delivered in-home utilizing cloud architecture and agile pattern”.

On agile birth, the doc stated this form of in-home pattern methodology was successfully-suited to bring the census, mainly because of the the have to adore the implications of working a dwell, scalable service similtaneously it was being built. Running a dwell service and iterating it over the years must not bask in been imaginable for the 2021 census, for the reason that technologies underpinning it were handiest required for a explicit period and consistency in birth was vital.

Additionally, the doc noted the digital census was designed in opposition to ability cyber security attacks. The platforms were secured in opposition to recordsdata exfiltration attacks, which would bask in brought on the doubtless loss of voters’ online response recordsdata, apart from to service disruption attacks and events, comparable to dispensed denial of service attacks and web web page defacing.

Dwell operations on the ONS also incorporated a security operations centre supporting phishing save detection, which would provoke the takedown of websites making an strive to rip-off the public into thinking they were being adopted up for non-completion of the census.

The digital-first census also informed the ONS regarding the web behaviours of folk utilizing the service, the doc pointed out, and this could increasingly perhaps even be worthwhile in future remarkable government digital service birth.

Average completion time for the questionnaire was 23 minutes, but remarkable proportions carried out it in 16 to 17 minutes. Most folk (56.4%) carried out the survey through cell devices, while 34.6% extinct desktops and 8.9% extinct tablet devices.

Based fully on the ONS workforce, the high online completion rate exceeded expectations, and likewise demonstrates definite advances in digital inclusion. “From this we’re better ready to adore the willingness of voters to work alongside with national government services and products online and the plot in which they assemble so,” the doc noted.

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