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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

#121

Post by severalbadgers »

kingcharles wrote: post #114
severalbadgers wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Slightly OT: but how many badgers are we talking about here? This many? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI

At least 4, but varying based on badger availability and amount of work needing to be done

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#122

Post by severalbadgers »

denysvitali wrote: post #113
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.

Also interesting to mention: if you use gov.uk's PaaS, then you can use the Hashicorp Waypoint [0] plugin for Cloud Foundry [1] :) [0]: https://www.waypointproject.io/ [1]: https://github.com/swisscom/waypoint-plugin-cloudfoundry

Yaknow, I was expecting somebody would make a CF plugin for Waypoint. I just didn't expect it'd be before 1.0! I'm going to take a look at this, thanks.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#123

Post by inwit »

motohagiography wrote: post #23

Very 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 ma…

just a little bit of scope creep there

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#124

Post by regularfry »

severalbadgers wrote: post #71
regularfry wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That'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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#125

Post by motohagiography »

inwit wrote: post #123
motohagiography wrote: post #23

Very 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 ma…

just a little bit of scope creep there

indeed, 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.

Re: Gov.uk Platform as a Service

#126

Post by blitzar »

toyg wrote: post #32
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?

Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture). With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take it up w…

> every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor)

There seems to be a much longer history of MPs and PMs being corrupt than the mandarins.

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