The technology division built and ran it; the Fire and Rescue Department’s Emergency Preparedness Division owned the mission. The enterprise architecture group set what the platform would be and how it had to behave, and the delivery teams built inside that.
An iOS and Android application alongside the public site. The core function was evacuation and flood zone lookup, served by a dedicated web service tier with the zone mapping data behind it, with advisories, news and preparedness information around that. The site itself ran on the City’s Kentico content management platform, shared with the main municipal site, the Sheriff’s Office, the Tax Collector, the courts and six others.
The afternoon it had to be publicly reachable
In May 2014 the City redrew its evacuation zones, and the Fire Chief and the communications office had set a press release date.
The problem surfaced on a Friday. The development build pointed at an internal host not reachable from outside the network, and the quality assurance host did not exist yet — and would not have been externally reachable either. No public endpoint meant no weekend test before a public announcement of where residents were to evacuate to.
The fix was same-day: published the DNS and public-address mapping that afternoon, mapped through to the internal host, and carried the related change through to decommissioning the old map platform it replaced.
The architecture failure was not in the application. It was that a life-safety service had no externally reachable path two days before the press release, and nobody owned the question until somebody asked it. That is the kind of gap that does not appear in any component’s documentation, because it is not inside a component.
Why its availability became an architecture problem
The Tropical Storm Hermine release of September 2016 named local media, social media, the City website and the JaxReady application as the paths shelter information would travel. The mass-notification test that year — a recorded message pushed to every City office and mobile phone — directed every recipient to the site for further information.
Once the organization’s own emergency communications name a platform as a channel, that platform is part of the public information chain. Its availability moves out of web operations and into architecture, because the consequence of its being down has changed.
The same year taught the inverse lesson from the opposite direction: a 2014 update failed for anyone on the City’s own secure wireless — on every network except one, on both platforms at once. That matters precisely because the staff on City wireless are the people residents ask during an activation. They would have concluded the application was broken, and told residents so.
Tested as critical infrastructure
In the enterprise disaster recovery architecture the content management platform was named a top-five application for business continuity, with the preparedness site among those it carried.
Load testing became a standing exercise rather than a pre-launch gate: server expansion and baseline captures across the municipal estate in 2020; an annual test in 2021 that opened the question of moving the load balancer path from one gigabit to two, with the internal trunk and external interface configuration reviewed against it; and two runs in May 2022, at eight thousand five hundred and then ten thousand virtual users, with comparison reporting and the balancing algorithm values examined. Production denial-of-service exercises ran against the same perimeter, and demilitarized zone switch replacement planning tracked the site among those at risk.
A preparedness site is the one public service whose peak load and its worst day are the same day. Every other public-facing system can be sized against ordinary demand and allowed to degrade under the unusual. This one is quietest when nothing is wrong. That is the whole argument for testing it on a schedule rather than discovering its ceiling during a storm.
Outcome
2012 Government Computer News award, and named in the outgoing mayor's final message among the division's award-winning applications.