Quoted post unavailable.
Little bit of a stretch to go from "UK government website will use AWS" to conclude that "European public sector will be completely dependent on US"
Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
11–20 of 163 posts
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
Is OVH a PaaS?
If Managed Kubernetes counts as a PaaS, maybe? https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/public-cloud/kubernetes/
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
GOV.UK PaaS always ran on top of AWS (though in UK and Ireland regions), so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway
Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
Yandex, I guess.
You also have a variety of smaller providers hosting OpenStack, which gives you some platformy services.
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#14They mention a handful of services like GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay, the GOV.UK Design System, the Prototype Kit, and the new GOV.UK Forms product. Is anyone able to clarify whether these things are collectively referred to or considered part of the Gov.uk PaaS offering (and therefore will all be decomissioned) or not? It wasn't clear to me from the article and I'm not otherwise familiar.
My understanding is those are services various government departments can make use of. Notify being to send notifications to people, Pay to take payments, etc. These are basically SaaS offerings from GDS to over government departments.
The GOV.UK PaaS is a hosting platform for other government departments to host their own software in the GOV.UK managed platform (like a Heroku kind of thing).
They're investing more in their SaaS services (Notify, Pay, Forms, Prototyping Kit, etc) and deprecating their PaaS offering in favour of Kubernetes, which looks like it may be offered as a managed service for government departments to use. It reads to me like more of a v2 of the PaaS but it'll now be kube based rather than whatever homegrown thing it is at the moment.
Edit: as tnwhitwell pointed out below, the PaaS being deprecated uses CloudFoundry and isn't homegrown.
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
GOV.UK PaaS always ran on top of AWS (though in UK and Ireland regions), so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway
Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
Lidl (germany supermarket company) backed STACKIT?
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
Yandex, I guess. You also have a variety of smaller providers hosting OpenStack, which gives you some platformy services.
If you count Russia to be European, which is debatable from both a cultural and a geographical perspective. Yandex only has one data center outside of Russia/definitely in Europe, and last I heard, they needed 600,000€ worth of diesel per day to keep it running.
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#17I think it has to be intentional, but if not it’s still funny :)
> ”Over the same period departments have built better and more expert in-house cloud engineering capability, and are (broadly) clustering around a Kubernetes based architecture.”*
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#18Quoted post unavailable.
Quoted post unavailable.
> To be fair, Europe as a whole is 20-30 years behind on most fronts from the state of the art of information technology.
This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.
Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my country) in seconds, completely free of charge and involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in the EU, because the governments stimulated and mandated large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
GOV.UK PaaS always ran on top of AWS (though in UK and Ireland regions), so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway
Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
Memset is based in the UK. Used them a few years back, but I'm afraid we moved to AWS after a few too many reliability issues.
Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
#20They mention a handful of services like GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK Pay, the GOV.UK Design System, the Prototype Kit, and the new GOV.UK Forms product. Is anyone able to clarify whether these things are collectively referred to or considered part of the Gov.uk PaaS offering (and therefore will all be decomissioned) or not? It wasn't clear to me from the article and I'm not otherwise familiar.
Those were originally part of the GaaP (Government as a Platform) programme. The PaaS is explicitly just the Cloud Foundry-based deployment platform.