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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

#141

Post by userabchn »

noahtallen wrote: post #122
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…

We don’t even have to zoom in on Europe. In the US, it’s quite common for folks to expect public services (like public transit or even the USPS) to be profitable. Which means these services don’t get the investment they really need.

If it was providing a service of as much value as was being spent on it, then why shouldn't it be profitable?

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

#142

Post by jonathantf2 »

wyuenho wrote: post #75
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…

Where do you think those digital infrastructure are hosted?

OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc? European clouds that don't gauge their customers.

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

#143

Post by loafoe »

severalbadgers wrote: post #29
loafoe wrote: post #4

Another Cloud foundry based platform moving on to Kubernetes. Perhaps https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s can provide a simple migration path..

Have you seen Korifi? https://github.com/cloudfoundry/korifi This is the one I expect to become the primary CF product on k8s

Ah, another one! On the other hand, if you've already containerized your app and are not using buildpacks, the switch to Kubernetes should be fairly easy. Thanks for the link, will check.

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

#144

Post by orev »

userabchn wrote: post #141
noahtallen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t even have to zoom in on Europe. In the US, it’s quite common for folks to expect public services (like public transit or even the USPS) to be profitable. Which means these services don’t get the investment they really need.

If it was providing a service of as much value as was being spent on it, then why shouldn't it be profitable?

Having a profit motive drives a behavior of raising prices as high as the market will bear. That inherently excludes citizens who cannot afford to pay the “most efficient” price, who are often the ones who need the service the most (e.g. busses and other public transport). That reduces the ability for society to operate as a whole. If someone can’t afford to get to school, or to an entry-level job, how will they ever be able to move up in skills and pay? Who will the high-end electronic store sell their products to if people can’t afford them?

Municipal services are meant to serve as many citizens as possible, not to extract as much profit as possible, because it’s an overall benefit to everyone.

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

#146

Post by genousti »

capableweb wrote: post #120
jeromenerf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe based": yes, we are french. "Currently operating": yes, steadily, for seven years now. "Noteworthy": yes, I really hope we are, at least, we have been quite newsworthy recently "Most companies seems to be US-based": well, we have US employees and we are running on top of US based companies infrastructure, amongst others. o/ -- platform.sh

"If I sign up to your service and deploy stuff to one of your Europe-based data centers, will my data ever land on a US-based company's servers?" [______] Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers (fonts.googleapis.com). Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem too privacy-aware so gonna…

It will. As long as the company does business in the us then american governmenet can force access to data hosted somewhere else. They did it in the past theyll do it again

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

#147

Post by wtetzner »

eterm wrote: post #74
jrochkind1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also though... the actual content, why? Why does GDS need to operate with a "growth mindset"?

Cynically it can be seen as part of the war on introversion. Consultancies rebadged introverts as having a "fixed mindset" and extroverts as having a "growth mindset" and then labelled having a fixed mindset as a terrible thing. But that criticism is demonstration of a "fixed mindset" and therefore should be discarded and should be ignored. That's the cynical take. The less cynical take is that having an open mind he…

It's not clear to me how "growth mindset" equates to "having an open mind".

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

#148

Post by dfadsadsf »

naasking wrote: post #98
dfadsadsf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries. Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could become huge problem.

> One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries. "Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no. If every nation except the US allied with Russia over Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out of Russia.

US can force Microsoft or Google to pull out of UK in the same way Russian government can force Gazprom to stop selling gas to Germany. Again it's unlikely in current geopolitical situation but imagine that fascists or communists come to power in US (both are non zero probability). If there is one thing that history teaches us is that alliances are unstable.

Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend time in jail.

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

#149

Post by tomcam »

noahtallen wrote: post #122
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…

We don’t even have to zoom in on Europe. In the US, it’s quite common for folks to expect public services (like public transit or even the USPS) to be profitable. Which means these services don’t get the investment they really need.

What percentage of US taxpayer money should go to subsidize money-losing services?

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

#150

Post by ksec »

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…

I am wondering if there are political force behind it, that big Cloud Provider wants the Government to shut down their own PaaS.
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