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Gov.uk Platform as a Service

cloud.service.gov.uk

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Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#51

Post by altacc »

toyg wrote: post #41
dariosalvi78 wrote: post #37

I 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.

There 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…

I 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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#52

Post by _joel »

londons_explore wrote: post #28
ale42 wrote: post #7

"The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK"... (see the beginning at https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/ )

But 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.

I doubt it, I worked on gcloud that provided several government departments access to our public cloud (and others, vetted and signed up to gcloud intiative) running openstack. They ended up going all in on AWS as it was simpler than managing multiple workloads across different cloud providers (not all Openstacks are the same!), oh, and DynamoDB.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#53

Post by unfocussed_mike »

Zenst wrote: post #48
toyg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.

I recall GDS being initiated for internal DOH stuff circa John Major, going into Blair era (yip was there when Blair took over the role). Not that I'd attribute it to any PM, believe it was driven by the government security services (which department/flavor I could not say). That all said, it may of been a different aspect but certainly has a longer story than told. With that, it started as an intranet project iirc.…

There was a significantly renewed manifesto-driven push to open source/open standards with the coalition in 2010; some of gov.uk really is down to Cameron rejecting the (Microsoft/EDS/Fujitsu-heavy) approaches of the previous administrations.

I don't really like giving them credit for anything but there it is.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#55

Post by ColinHayhurst »

toyg wrote: post #25
dan_pixelflow wrote: post #21

A 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…

Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.

Exactly, through recall this was Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, so Nick Clegg (you might have head of him) may have a claim.

Actually the credit should go to the brilliant and dedicated people in GDS doing great work; though I do not know enough to pick out names. The UI/UX and implementation was first class from the get go.

As a Brit my life is made remarkably easier as a citizen and startup entrepreneur. The benefits to the UK ecomnomy are enorous but not measured. In contrast my personal experience of govt engagement when setting-up and running startups in US between 1991 and 2013 were painful. And would have been very painful without help (thank you YC).

Finally if we are going to give leadership credit it should go to Francis Maude [0]. He happened to be my local MP, so I met him quite a few times, and he was most helpful and astonishingly effective in helping us navigate two big challenges we had in facing down, shall we say, "unethical quango-business partnerships". A remarkable, thoughtful man and effective operator, who was in government over three decades [1].

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#57

Post by trhoad »

reallydontask wrote: post #49
trhoad wrote: post #38

If 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/

Enterprise 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

I 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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#59

Post by 46Bit »

I 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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#60

Post by reallydontask »

trhoad wrote: post #57
reallydontask wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise 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

I 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 fo…

I 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 :)

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