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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

#71

Post by severalbadgers »

regularfry wrote: post #67
46Bit wrote: post #59

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.

When you say "based on", how much is layered on top?

(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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#72

Post by hughrr »

llampx wrote: post #46
somnium_sn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've moved from Germany to the US and then to the UK. gov.uk is by far the most impressive government website i've encountered. Accessible, consistent and just works. Really a good show of what a government website can offer if done right.

The German idea of an online platform is a website developed by Telekom (outsourced by them to the lowest bidder) which makes available the fax number of the Behörde, and the timings that the fax machine will receive incoming faxes.

That's as German as you get. I'm sure there is a German idiom for "that's how it's always been done and the change is someone else's fault" because that's the attitude. Had that a couple of times in shops. Business is bad because we're closed at peak times and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because we don't accept cards and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because our customers don't have fax machines these days and that's the customer's problem.

Recently I was with a German friend and she nearly fell on her ass when I showed her that you can actually pay at a car parking machine in the middle of nowhere with Apple Pay here in the UK.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#73

Post by igormilla »

gtsop wrote: post #70
toyg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They 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 i…

> awfully balkanized What does this phrase mean?

> 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

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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#74

Post by celticninja »

igormilla wrote: post #73
gtsop wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> awfully balkanized What does this phrase mean?

> 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 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.

Which 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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#75

Post by KineticLensman »

hughrr wrote: post #69
KineticLensman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there Some important UK government services are still lagging behind. DVLA, since you mention it, has a mix of okay and truly appalling services. I'm in the position of trying to renew my driving licence after it was revoked for medical reasons. It's now six months since my cardiac arrest and I now meet the medic…

The (old) DVLA web site is merely a shallow front end for the 30 year old incompetent bureaucratic triangle of carnage that hides behind it. To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.

> To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.

Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I supported the MOD's system development (simulators for training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to develop some interoperability middleware between disparate systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols / standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common requirements since may of them are doing very similar things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started working with the respective acquisition teams to get them to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place. This turned out to be because there were multiple customer project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each other at that level.

I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his training schools (which had multiple different types of simulator, each with out own through-life support programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple of decades working in this space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#76

Post by GOATS- »

altacc wrote: post #51
toyg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I 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!

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#77

Post by BoxOfRain »

mkdirp wrote: post #24
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…

> 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.

Yeah 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'.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#78

Post by BoxOfRain »

rswail wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister need to be spending his time listening to a report direct from a team implementing software services?

Effectively it was in the PM's department directly, which means it was not subject to cross-department jealousies etc. Watch some series of Yes Minister, even though set in the 1970s and 80s, it's still all true.

The Thick of It is supposedly not far from the reality either.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#79

Post by KaiserPro »

chippiewill wrote: post #34
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…

gov.uk was great from the day it launched. It continues from strength to strength.

not so much, some of the redesigns ripped out the usable data and replaced it with holding pages. Specifically to do with immigration, that hit us a couple of years ago.

However its pleasing to see a site that works well on crappy computers.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#80

Post by pydry »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #42
londons_explore wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably 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.

It 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.

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