>>Some of these services have already been established as reputable services. (And I hate to burst the bubble, but the jury is still out on one of the major cloud services....time will tell)

Yes, but you didn't and won't write off MS because its system went down for days, but it's Chicken Little Time if a certain new website gets taken down overnight. Why not extend the identical courtesy- that time will tell.

>>Of all people, Ezra Klein (generally an AHCA supporter) slammed these analogies from the White House in the Washington Post. No one is forced (by threat of financial penalty) to use those services. With the iPhone, you're talking about something that was working fine, then had a few glitches during iOS7 rollout that were nothing compared to what you're seeing with the AHCA technology rollout. Even the HHS or the Treasury can't (or won't) provide information on # of actual enrollments so far.

More smokescreen, especially when you consider that the Cloud takedowns prevented business for days and lost live data. People now are hunting for reasons to find fault with just this one website. As a parallel, others have commented on the turmoil as Continental and United deployed their new shared system. Experienced it myself- but no, I did not decide United is incompetent, because I was not already prejudiced against United.

>>There is not a single aspect of this rollout that hasn't come across as anything but completely bush-league. You might be interested (though you might not admit online) in some of the technical assessments of the implementation. I'd always wondered when talk would turn to what's under the hood.

Does the site use SQL Server? What I can see is that earlier less suitable client-side code has been optimized quickly. Attackers seize on the initial fault; others of us are impressed how quickly it got resolved.

I've always believed that the measure of an entity is not how it performs when everything's fine, but how it performs when things go wrong. Some companies clam up and refuse to explain at all and take days to resolve issues and lose data, but still are surrounded by fans who think of themselves as tech professionals. Others repair quickly and explain. I know which I prefer.