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Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

gds.blog.gov.uk

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Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#81

Post by jen20 »

benj111 wrote: post #68

I wish this were spread to other government IT things. The NHS uses a patchwork of different systems. Why should every hospital have to sort out its own IT needs. Let the NHS do NHS things and have an IT branch providing standardised software for everyone.

This is largely what Connecting for Health attempted, and the only good things that came out of it were intangible to most - N3 and the UK SNOMED extensions.

Unfortunately this was largely down to incompetent consultancies, and a focus on providing what management wanted rather than what clinicians wanted, and it has absolutely poisoned the well with regards to information technology in the NHS.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#82

Post by trasz »

Hamuko wrote: post #16
tazjin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Russia is definitely not European from business perspective; it’s closer to North Korea now.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#83

Post by naasking »

whylo wrote: post #3
mordae wrote: post #2

Quoted post unavailable.

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

> so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway

I'm not sure large multinational corporations belong to any specific country at this point.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#84

Post by trasz »

atwood22 wrote: post #25
mordae wrote: post #2

Quoted post unavailable.

Don't feel bad. Europeans have a much better work-life balance. Plenty of parental leave. A culture that prioritizes life outside the office. Six weeks of guaranteed vacation that people actually take. Etc. Those things have a price. Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens, which means less productivity growth happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on. I lived in Germany for two years. I…

You’re conflating innovation with office work, while in reality it’s often - or mostly - the inverse: the work patterns typical for software industry hurt innovation, replacing it mindless repetition - see the vast majority of software startups.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#85

Post by tallanvor »

vertis wrote: post #42
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tri…

Agreed, there are so many areas where the US trails the rest of the world as far as technology is concerned. The Australian taxation system tech would probably be enough to make most US citizens cry for what they have to endure, and I'm not even sure it's the best one out there. Paying on credit card in the US was painful compared to the experience in Australia a few years ago. Australia had tap-to-pay everywhere and…

Technology isn't the reason the US appears to lag in some cases - business and governmental policy decisions are behind everything you list, and plenty of people don't like it.

The truth is that 20-30 years ago Europe was lagging behind the US in some respects - credit card acceptance, computer usage in some businesses, etc. But obviously they're on par with the US today, and where they're ahead or behind the US the reason isn't access to technology, rather it's usually government policy.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#86

Post by regularfry »

londons_explore wrote: post #72
benj111 wrote: post #68

I wish this were spread to other government IT things. The NHS uses a patchwork of different systems. Why should every hospital have to sort out its own IT needs. Let the NHS do NHS things and have an IT branch providing standardised software for everyone.

Large government IT projects end up being done by companies expert in extracting as much cash from the government as possible. The end result is the product doesn't work properly and is massively over budget. Then the government is forced to hand over even more money to redesign bits to work better. The government has been bitten by this many times, so now shys away from big IT systems. Instead every department has t…

The move at the moment is for central orgs to specify standards and protocols so it doesn't matter who implements them and the delegated authorities can buy from whoever. That goes some way to preventing both one-big-vendor setups and unstandardised fragmentation, and it was blindingly obvious to anyone who's ever implemented more than a bash script that it was the correct approach even 20 years ago. Only it's taken a generation of civil servants ageing out at the top end to make it happen.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#87

Post by robga »

The June 2021 assessment [0] of the service notes that "the team will never be able to fully recoup their cost through a recharge model so will need to rely on centrally provided funding. This poses an important risk to the longevity of the product, as it is *dependent on political buy-in and budget from the Treasury*".

[0] https://www.gov.uk/service-standard-reports/gov-dot-uk-platf...

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#88

Post by tallanvor »

ojhughes wrote: post #32
wyuenho wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Can you renew your driving license online in the US?

Yes, although at least in Washington State you can only renew online every other time since they want you to come in and get a new picture taken every 12-16 years. Which isn't really unreasonable when you consider that's your main photo id.

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#89

Post by ar0 »

atwood22 wrote: post #39
maccard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens, which means less productivity growth happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on. That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work. Work smarter, not harder and all that. Productivity isn't tied to time spent in office - my experi…

> That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work. I agree but I think you’ll find that working usually contributes economic value. Not working usually doesn’t. The key word being usually. if you’re in doubt, just try to record the economic value delivered by your downtime. How many hours are idled…

> I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.

Actually, the differences are quite small and in 2017 Germany overtook the US in labour productivity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Re: Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS

#90

Post by sofixa »

capableweb wrote: post #5
whylo wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

There's Scaleway that provide managed Kubernetes and also "serverless" (containers or functions as a service, based on Knative).
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