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Gov.uk Platform as a Service
- buggeryorkshire 5y agoThis is a good thing. But not for ukcloud, who are still the worst provider in this space.
- Hallucinaut 5y agoProbably a bit unfair. They were early to the market and met all the usual UK Govt. paper-firewall rules well before the hyperscalers were viable options. It's just they haven't found a good fit in between the global forces of G.A.A and the legacy Fujitsu datacentre style approach and the Govt. has become somewhat more pragmatic over cloud for many workloads.
- that_guy_iain 5y agoLooking at the fact it has S3 and SQS in the calculator this could just be hosted on AWS but with payment done via the internal budgeting stuff.
- ollybee 5y agoIt is hosted on AWS, from the features page: "The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK, "
- breakfastduck 5y agoYes exactly, it lets public sector teams / orgs quickly host something without needing experts or a load of red tape. It's a go-to approved hoster with internal government support available.
- guiriduro 5y agoLooks like a decent CloudFoundry implementation, doing what its good at: keeping developer teams abstracted from lower level cloud infrastructure and orchestration internals.
- guiriduro 5y agoWhich looks to be available here with a MIT license : https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf
- ilikerashers 5y agoVery difficult to have a one size fits all unfortunately. There is a lot of variance around what a secure platform should do across government. There are already a ton of snowflake "single platform for X department" deployments. That said, I applaud the effort and hope it becomes the norm.
- ale42 5y ago"The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK"... (see the beginning at https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/ https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/)
- londons_explore 5y agoBut when it gets big enough, it might be worth the government spinning up their own hardware and competing. Are there any other cloud providers who have started by reselling another cloud providers products? Even as a reseller they ought to be able to make a decent profit by relying on volume discounts.
- legostormtroopr 5y agoProbably not - this is probbaly done to ensure apps are hosted correctly, and conform to specific security requirements while also being easy to deploy and maintain. I doubt the UK government is interested in setting up competing infrastructure.
- pydry 5y agoIt will if Amazon keeps boiling the frog with pricing. Having a consistent platform like this also gives them negotiating muscle because if they wanted to up sticks and move completely it is much more feasible.
- jsty 5y ago> Amazon keeps boiling the frog with pricing Do they? AWS's pricing may be eye watering in a few cases - looking at you egress - but one thing they definitely get right from my PoV is rarely if ever hiking prices
- manquer 5y agoThey don't change unit pricing if that is what you mean not even at very high volume. That means bill increases become costlier at scale as the volume discounts are not deep enough in a build vs buy on a pure cost basis (Lock-in, ease of use, reliability, talent reasons apart) at 100's of millions or billions spends governments do not to consider inhousing.
- was_a_dev 5y agoIs the text rendering really poorly for anyone else? I've not had such issues on the goverment website before. The issue seems to be with Firefox, there's no issue in Edge. I assume Chrome would be fine as well
- cassianoleal 5y agoLooks fine for me. macOS Monterey 12.2, Firefox 96.0.2.
- jraph 5y agoThe page renders perfectly with Firefox on Ubuntu. Either blocking or allowing web fonts.
- iso1631 5y agoLooks fine to me on Ubuntu https://imgur.com/35cLwPH.png https://imgur.com/35cLwPH.png
- hugoromano 5y agoSounds lovely but limits competition and innovation, promoting oligopolies. I admire the nerve of "10% Procurement fee". Wait until there is a guideline that demands the use of GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS) for the UK Public sector. A sensible approach would have been a list of certified service providers and contact points for contracting.
- chrisseaton 5y agoDo you realise this is the government building software for the government? That's like complaining that Amazon have a monopoly on hosting Amazon services. > A sensible approach would have been a list of certified service providers and contact points for contracting. No let's not for example ask the Forestry Commission to build or contract their own cloud services... that's not what they know about or what they're going to be good at.
- hugoromano 5y agoIn this case Gov.UK PaaS has a single vendor, AWS. I am in favour of multiple options, multiple vendors. The certification can be done by Gov UK agency that guarantees vendors up to spec. The current model "Forestry Commission" still needs to build, develop, define spec, buy and pay Gov.UK PaaS.
- londons_explore 5y agoI would expect to see a 10% procurement discount, since they presumably have more negotiating power with AWS when buying £££££'s worth of stuff annually, rather than every individual government team setting up a small account for a few ££'s.
- trhoad 5y agoFor that 10% fee, a Government department gets a whole host of DevOps support, all the contractual stuff dealt with, all the security vetting / compliance bits sorted out. The alternative is they can go and hire all those people to make that happen and it takes months or years and cost £000's more than the fee!
- rorymalcolm 5y agoThis is part of a wider suite of tools developed and run by the Government Digital Service including Notify (lets you send texts, letters and emails, https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/ https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/) and Pay (lets you take inbound payments quickly, https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/ https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/).
- petepete 5y agoAs a user, Notify is my favourite service ever. It's just so well designed, you can get up and running in about two minutes, and you can even use it to send yourself official looking letters in the post. What's not to love?
- rorymalcolm 5y agoTotally agree, an unbelievably good service that does what it says on the tin in the best and most intuitive way.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y agoWhile this makes complete sense I feel like I slept for 10 years and woke up in Looney Tunes universe where the Gov wants to sell you EC2 instances.
- toyg 5y agoThey are not selling it to you, but "public sector services". It's effectively the national government telling the various bureaucracies "hey, we got this cool service over here, easy to use and probably cheaper than what you are doing - give it a spin maybe?" In more "Napoleonic" countries the State would just mandate adoption and you'd never know it, but in the UK the public sector is awfully balkanized, so there is a need for public marketing.
- gtsop 5y ago> awfully balkanized What does this phrase mean?
- igormilla 5y ago> Balkanization is the fragmentation of a larger region or state into smaller regions or states, which may be hostile or uncooperative with one another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization Applying this to a government you will have one where you have a lot of separate agencies that are hostile, uncooperative, and don't want to follow any unified standards.
- celticninja 5y agoWhich means it is not an accurate description as most agencies are not hostile to one another or uncooperative, its just that they are independent and have (sometimes) competing goals. They have no requirement to work together, but some are realising that there are benefits to doing so.
- toyg 5y ago
- pimlottc 5y agoSee also cloud.gov for the US Federal government. https://cloud.gov/ https://cloud.gov/ https://github.com/cloud-gov https://github.com/cloud-gov
- trhoad 5y agoNot sure why this is here (it's been in use for a while), but for the uninitiated, the GOV.UK PaaS is an abstraction over AWS that helps to standardise what has historically been a fragmented approach to hosting applications.
- dan_pixelflow 5y agoA bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. The GDS (Government Digital Service [0]) and the GDS (Government Design System [1]) - who run the posted link too - are doing a great job. Want to renew my passport? Easy, same UI/UX for getting a drone license, taxing my car and filing for benefits. Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there! [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit... [1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ Edit: Yes, I know the UK Gov's system for benefits isn't easy to understand. That's on the Gov, not GDS :)
- mkdirp 5y ago> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. In my experience gov.uk has been vastly superior compared to other websites for a long time. Gov.uk seems to be more consistent with everything than most company websites are.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoYeah the British government's IT projects have a bad reputation but credit where credit's due gov.uk is really good in my opinion. I remember reading (probably here) that it was designed with a philosophy of 'our users don't have a choice but to use our software, so we must make it as un-infuriating as possible'.
- 0898 5y agoAgree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something the UK can be really proud of.
- 12ian34 5y agoAgreed. I was delighted that my passport renewal process from first applying all the way to getting my new valid passport was about 12 days. The UK government's digital services is honestly a big factor in keeping me a UK resident
- motohagiography 5y agoVery cool. Worked adjacent to something similar in public sector. If you are doing this for a govt, may I recommend you include the following services: - IAM Federation and brokerage service that takes arbitrary IDPs (every application is a simple document management problem at the tip of the iceberg, with a giant authN/AuthZ problem underneath. Consider authZ as a service as well) - HSM/Vault for standard secrets management across applications - Encrypted backup to data lake service, with cold storage option. - vulnerability scanning and patch management (lines of business can't be trusted to do application patching) - CI/CD pipeline service - Jira/ADO or other "standard" project collaboration scheme Managers don't usually know about this stuff, and they're the dealbreakers when you don't have them.
- inwit 5y agojust a little bit of scope creep there
- motohagiography 5y agoindeed, adding IAM is massive scope creep. I'd estimate anyone who understood that comment and didn't know it already saved about $100k in consulting fees and hundreds of hours of souding out why someones project is failing. These are the underlying issues.
- kinduff 5y agoI've been following on GitHub all the effort behind these gov.uk sites [1]. It's pretty inspiring, I even wanted a job there. The developers behind this effort are great, and well, they use Ruby which is my language of choice at the moment. [1]: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
- dariosalvi78 5y agoI had to deal with public administration in the UK, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The UK one is probably the easiest to use. You can definitely see that there is an excellent team behind.
- toyg 5y agoThere is one weakness, in my opinion, but it's not the service's fault as much as a national problem: identification is still messy. Whereas most continental administration have standardized on some sort of electronic-signature standard (which can be used to communicate safely and reliably as well as signing actual documents), the UK has not. The result is that the ID system is still excessively amenable to fraud and prone to problems identifying complex identities across all services. This seems to be a national issue though, akin to the rejection of ID cards.
- altacc 5y agoI moved from the UK to Scandinavia and there is a BankID system that allows you to authenticate yourself for any digital service, public or private, and it's amazing how useful that is. I work in financial services and the ability to correctly identify a new customer removes a bunch of problems that we'd have elsewhere. The flip side is that if you don't want this ID it becomes more difficult (but not impossible) to access any digital service. It also relies on an integrated public population register, which some people have problems with. But it's not a physical ID that you can be asked for or are required to have, so doesn't have the ideological & political issues of requiring a universal ID card.
- GOATS- 5y agoI did the opposite move, from Scandinavia to the UK - it wasn't easy to adapt to the various identifications methods here like GOV.UK Verify and other platforms versus just using BankID everywhere. It was also weird seeing how every bank here has their own authentication method!
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
- trhoad 5y agoIf anyone is interested in doing similar work at UK Parliament, we're on the same journey that UK Gov are on, although not quite as advanced yet so there's a lot of scope to shape what we're working on from an early stage: https://www.parliament.uk/about/working/jobs/ https://www.parliament.uk/about/working/jobs/
- reallydontask 5y agoEnterprise architect at £50-60k per year seems like a role that has been put on the jobs website to provide evidence that it cannot be filled and thus can go to a service company rather than an honest expectation of getting any realistic candidates Maybe I'm being too cynical
- trhoad 5y agoI don't know about that particular role, but I can say that many people work in public service knowing full well they could probably double their salary in the private sector, but do it anyway. Mainly because of the large amount of annual leave and a pension that is unbeatable in the private sector, but also the opportunity to do really interesting work in genuinely unique environment, rather than work for another food delivery startup.
- reallydontask 5y agoI am a civil servant and while it's technically true that I could double my pay in the private sector, I would likely be on the top 1 percentile or higher. I'd guess that salary is on the bottom 10 percentile for enterprise architects. Edit Pension is a good reason too, it is my main reason :)
- mpeg 5y agoWhile I understand that some people want to work in public service because they find the kind of work more meaningful; I think those reasons are a bit weak. From what I can see, the annual leave for these roles is 30 days per year, this is nice but 25 days is pretty standard in most tech jobs in the UK, with some employers allowing you to sacrifice salary in exchange for more days (+ or - 5 days in exchange for equivalent days of salary) I know the pension plan for civil service is particularly good, but I wonder how it compares in terms of actual pension pay with having worked for big tech and contribute part of a salary that is, as you said, probably double – plus company contributions or matching which can be quite high (5-10%). Also, the RSUs you get and yearly refreshers kinda become your pension plan for a lot of tech workers. Life isn't all about money, but for most people money is the primary reason to choose one company over another.
- robertlagrant 5y agoI went for an interview with GDS a few years ago. The interview itself was 5 hours long, which was gruelling, but it looked like a great setup. I'm not surprised they're doing well. (I got an offer, but turned it down in the end.)
- was_a_dev 5y agoHeaven forbid we think you failed the interview
- blitzar 5y agoAbsolutely aced the interview, they offered me the role of the boss of the boss that I was interviewing for, a massive sign on bonus, a salary so large that it would have affected the debt to GDP ratio of the country and the biggest corner office they had. On my way out through the lobby everyone applauded, it was a great day for all.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago[dead]
- robertlagrant 5y agoPeople sometimes ask :-) apologies if it caused offense.
- Shalomboy 5y agoDamn, I wish the USDS was this robust :/
- pcurve 5y agoI wonder how their costs fare against the competition. (sorry, cloud space isn't my forte) https://admin.london.cloud.service.gov.uk/calculator https://admin.london.cloud.service.gov.uk/calculator
- 46Bit 5y agoI worked on this for nearly four years. It’s a great fit for a lot of government needs: they need a stable, reasonably secure platform that helps them build medium-complexity websites. It’s based on Cloud Foundry, a “run your own Heroku”-type project. That’s starting to show it’s age now but it’s been a great model and had major benefits in government. Happy to answer more questions.
- regularfry 5y agoWhen you say "based on", how much is layered on top?
- severalbadgers 5y ago(current PaaS person here) We've maintained the core Cloud Foundry experience, and added value around the edge with service brokers, good documentation, support, app autoscaling (using the CF-blessed autoscaler, which doesn't come "in the box"), some additional metrics, and a couple other bits.
- kingcharles 5y agoSlightly OT: but how many badgers are we talking about here? This many? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
- severalbadgers 5y agoAt least 4, but varying based on badger availability and amount of work needing to be done
- regularfry 5y agoThat's interesting. Where I work we've got an in-house deployment of a CF fork (public, not ours) which... yeah, nobody likes, and AWS and GCP are getting more of our money every year as we shift stuff off. Just the autoscaling wouldn't be enough to keep us on it, but running it on someone-else's-infrastructure with a proper support model might.
- adam 5y agoWe run the Cosmic Bazaar forecasting service (Economist article: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/how-spooks-are-turning-to-superforecasting-in-the-cosmic-bazaar https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/...) on their PaaS and their services and people have been excellent to work with all around. Friendly, professional shop.
- regularfry 5y agoWhat's the actual platform like to work with?
- harel 5y agoI've actually deployed on Gov PAAS, and as long as your stack conforms to the requirements it's quite a pleasant experience.
- say_it_as_it_is 5y agoTaxpayers of the UK ought to get free hosting with this platform, considering they already paid for it. Cut government spending if it has resources to do this sort of work. Government is not to provide business services.
- teh_klev 5y agoThey're not services any old business can apply for, the service is aimed at other government/public sector organisation.
- funshed 5y agoNothing is free, if they did that Tax's would have to raise to cover the costs. Plus this is not for busineses but for the Government Department(s) themselves and Quangos.