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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

#131

Post by corrral »

andrekandre wrote: post #70
mschuster91 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but how much of the value that this is based on is artificially inflated, either by outright bullshit such as HFT and other forms of "wealth" that are solely created out of numbers or to account for indirect bullshit such as absurd healthcare and rent costs that drive up wages and, indirectly, product prices?

> artificially inflated a huge chunk of that is excessive healthcare costs https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expendi...

Yup. My back-of-envelope from past looks at this is that 5-10% of US GDP is purely drag from excess healthcare costs, i.e. we'd collectively be better off and our economy (entrepreneurship, especially) healthier if that amount of our GDP simply vanished, even though it would mean lower GDP per capita.

There's a quote from Obama in an article from The Nation years ago, that basically says we can't fix our healthcare system properly because it would put too many (white-collar make-work jobs program participants, essentially, under our current system) people out of work.

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

#132

Post by corrral »

trasz wrote: post #21

>The big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP and others) have upped their game So now UK citizens are going to be forced to use services from a country known for largely non-working legal system (where being provably innocent is not enough to call off execution, see Scalia; where a monetary fine is an adequate sentence for premeditated murder, see OG Simpson, not to mention de facto legal immunity for cops committing cr…

> OG Simpson

It's OJ, but thanks for giving me the perfect stage name for my 90s-pop-culture-themed hip-hop act.

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

#133

Post by tvararu »

I've used the GOV.UK PaaS since the private beta. I was a user research subject and gave early feedback. I've used it on multiple projects since.

As with Notify, the Design System, and all the other great tools that GDS produces, the PaaS is an absolute joy to use. Think Heroku, but built on top of FOSS, and with everything you could want to help you build the long tail of cookie cutter form or API-based government services.

It's a damn shame GDS killed it.

It's even worse they did so without providing a clear migration path. That sends a very bad message to other departments: GDS will kill things you depend on. They will also leave you high and dry when they do so. So don't depend on or adopt their tools. "Not invented here" has always been a problem in the UK government, this news only makes it worse.

Colleagues of mine have staked their reputation on the line to convince legacy IT to let us use the PaaS instead of their own home-grown, poorly documented, and unsatisfactory solutions. Now, we look like fools.

I love working in government. I love building accessible, robust, and user-centred services.

I don't love: writing IAM policies, learning about what a "service principal" is, naming resource groups, having to open a support ticket to change an environment variable, having my password expire in the middle of an incident when I want to read logs, or spending more than £50 a month of taxpayer money for a monolith with a database and a Redis. I had to do none of those on the PaaS.

RIP.

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

#134

Post by AdrianB1 »

skrebbel wrote: post #121
banach wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pathetic example of the ideological myopia that plagues Europe these days. States have provided services to their inhabitants since prehistory, and the notion that this infrastructure does not need financing is as healthy as a corporation that thinks it does not need to invest to succeed. At best, this strategy of living off of investments made by previous generations is doomed to underperform compared to states th…

> compared to states that take an active role in their own development. I'm not sure I follow your argument. Which non-European states do you think do this well?

Probably the Moon colony around year 2150.

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

#135

Post by wyuenho »

bennyp101 wrote: post #125
wyuenho wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

So, what you are trying to say is: "Please stop sending us your well educated and skilled people - we need to spend more money on our country and citizens, not absurd wages for tech"? That's super kind of you, I think Europe could get back on its feet with that kind of leg up.

What I'm saying is, at this point, Europe has lost the competition on so many waves of technological disruptions, there's simply no hope. The only thing Europe can do to gain back some international negotiating power is to invest in the next wave. Unfortunately, we can pretty much declare Europe has lost on AI, and good luck with hydrogen-based energy.

The European brain drain to America simply will not stop until there's a complete ecosystem.

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

#136

Post by matthewcford »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #47
rambojazz wrote: post #23

I don't get it, are they saying that public organizations should move to using AWS/Azure/GCP?

In a way, it could be interpreted like that. It's another way of saying "maintaining infrastructure isn't a task of a public service." Generally, the "why/why not" tends to be answered with: "A public services can never provide a similar value proposition compared to private vendors." which isn't really an answer to the question. One problematic aspect is that public entities don't just rely on infrastructure, but al…

Given they charged a markup on AWS costs, I find that it's weird they did not manage to at least break even. Other departments switching to running on their own cloud account rather than use the PaaS could be the main reason, and that's partly due to the PaaS/Cloud foundry stagnating.

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

#137

Post by matthewcford »

tvararu wrote: post #133

I've used the GOV.UK PaaS since the private beta. I was a user research subject and gave early feedback. I've used it on multiple projects since. As with Notify, the Design System, and all the other great tools that GDS produces, the PaaS is an absolute joy to use. Think Heroku, but built on top of FOSS, and with everything you could want to help you build the long tail of cookie cutter form or API-based government s…

Agree, I'm not sure how they can say with a straight face that people should use the other new forms services they are launching. If that is not profitable will it just be shut down in a few years too?

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

#138

Post by sakisv »

tuukkah wrote: post #128
sakisv wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that this is something that would have be done before announcing the decommissioning in 18 months.

Indeed. Perhaps the purpose of this message was to let all the projects know they get no advice but a permission and freedom to migrate anywhere . After a while, there may not be anyone to use a PaaS v2 anymore.

Something which won't exactly inspire confidence for any similar attempts in the future

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

#139

Post by temac »

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…

Economic value has no strong meaning. When you mow your lawn yourself, does this action have economic value? If so, why is it not measured? If not, why does it have if you hire someone to do the work for you? Likewise for some jobs that are quite country specific: do old people who need a job to survive have more economic value than old annuitant people who can take care of their grand-children? What about reading a book? What about then discussing about said book with others? What if that discussion makes some students better? What if you are a teacher? What if you are a benevolent? What about writing a novel that would have had tremendous economic value if published but keeping it to yourself? What if that novel is then published after your death?

Productivity has no strong meaning either. How do you measure it? GDP PPP / worker / hour? What if it actually depends on externalities like the amount of carbon released in the atmosphere? What is actually a worker (back at the what is "work" and "economic value" point)? What if it counts destroying then rebuilding things (as-is)? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses coming in part because some people illegal pushed for addictive drugs to be way over-prescribed by corrupting physicians?

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

#140

Post by matthewcford »

I was the first user of the GOV.UK PaaS for a production service - GOV.UK Trade Tariff [0]. It's unfortunate that it has come to this, and as others have pointed out, the blog doesn't instil confidence about using other GDS services in the future.

Procurement in government is painfully slow, and that's one thing that the PaaS excelled at, all departments could get set up immediately.

I hope when making their financial assessment, they included the saving that all departments using the PaaS are making not in infrastructure but ops. Each service will increase ops spending; there isn't a comparable managed platform for UK GOV services, so each service will have to increase its devops support costs. I've used Google Cloud Run and AWS Copilot, and both are far from stable enough, in my opinion, for production use.

My only hope is that they revisit this decision, but it seems likely we'll have to move the services we manage off.

[0] https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/trade-tariff-moves-to-g...

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