101–110 of 126 posts
Taxpayers 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.
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> 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.
Agree. 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.
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/
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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 hav…
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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.
> 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?
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
This 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/ ) and Pay (lets you take inbound payments quickly, https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/ ).
As 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?
"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.
Not really, this is not something we want governments doing.
In Canada, we spent almost $1B on a simple gun registry - the equivalent of a few spreadsheets with a few million records with security overlay, and almost $1B on a Federal Payroll system that doesn't work.
IT, particularly products, is one of those areas where budgets can go over by infinity, it's systematic white collar corruption.
If AWS becomes less than ideal, there's maybe another service provider that can do it.
Even this initiative, while laudable, may not be perfectly operationally ideal.
Just like AWS actually has carved out a special government offering of their services, I believe a host of other providers should as well ...
A PaaS/SaaS customized for a given domain, like a country, that built out basic identity services and privacy features given the local regulatory environment, would be ideal.
Then the gov. can legislate, communicate, provide oversight while risking the fewest dollars doing the trickiest things.
It's not entirely implausible that things can be managed effectively, Sweden has done some amazing things in particular with process and communication. But they are small and special and take 'design' seriously literally as a culture.
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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.
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
Sounds 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.
Do 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 go…