171–180 of 210 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data scientists... And when you look at the query, it'll be 800 lines of SQL...
Heh, that's not so bad - 2 jobs ago I had to fix a KPI generation process that was 70k lines of dynamic sql, that unwrapped to up to 1m LOC :)
Interesting, though I have no idea why the government is using AWS in the first place. This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns. We could build a public sector cloud and/or adopt a sensible on-prem approach. This requires funding, coordinatio…
Disclaimer: I work in the public sector. If you really think the public sector could build anything closely resembling any cloud, you are dreaming. Imagining that one cloud working for the entire public sector, we are entering delusional territory here. Public sector projects are insanely expensive, take ages to develop and often flat out fail. Not only that, we are starved for engineers even now. If we ran such a cu…
I don't think this means "government = bad at tech" though. You sometimes see smaller in-house teams do really good work. The biggest issue seems to be with contracting and procurement policy. For example, on the Police Scotland i6 program they hired a bunch of consultancies to write a tender document, and then hired CGI for the final project. That turned out to be a copy of the Spanish system, which turned into a huge and expensive disaster as the requirements differed.
Feels like government has a similar problem to a lot of legacy non-tech companies. They don't have much technical leadership, don't understand the problem, and decide to hand it off to the lowest bidder. Doesn't help that they are often legally obliged to act this way. But the underlying engineering problems aren't unsolvable, and don't need to become a huge mess every time. (Your point about recruitment is fair though)
Although it has some limitations it worked pretty well, and personally I like that it is cloud agnostic. Definitively I would recommend to consider pglogical first.
Now all we need is for Amazon to come out with a "government-as-a-service" product for your budding nation state.
FWIW GOV.UK Notify is part of a suite of services offered by GDS to UK public sector bodies (along with GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK PaaS) that was originally known as "Government As A Platform".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Database changes are typically one-way. If your new change includes creating or modifying a table, such that there are new additional columns, and you populate those with data, then downgrading would destroy the changed columns and the data in them. Hence you can't downgrade once you upgrade or you'd potentially be breaking things. To downgrade safely you'd need to backup or snapshot the old database, and then restor…
DB schema migration script frameworks (at least in Python, Ruby & Java lands) do typically support both upgrade and downgrade directions. People skip implementing and testing the downgrade side if the development model doesn't need it but the problem of what happens to the data is controlled by what you put in the "down" migration script. I'd guess if you can't throw the data away, you won't do a down migration, you'…
Interesting, though I have no idea why the government is using AWS in the first place. This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns. We could build a public sector cloud and/or adopt a sensible on-prem approach. This requires funding, coordinatio…
As a startup, my reason for using "cloud" (PaaS) is not to catch spikes, but because of focus. Every hour that I spend running around with HDDs, screwdrivers (or the cloud version thereof - storage, ansible, etc) is an hour that I'm not spending on stuff my customers need. Why would this be any different for a government? We don't expect our government to build their own cars, but to buy them from Volkswagen or Renau…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Database changes are typically one-way. If your new change includes creating or modifying a table, such that there are new additional columns, and you populate those with data, then downgrading would destroy the changed columns and the data in them. Hence you can't downgrade once you upgrade or you'd potentially be breaking things. To downgrade safely you'd need to backup or snapshot the old database, and then restor…
DB schema migration script frameworks (at least in Python, Ruby & Java lands) do typically support both upgrade and downgrade directions. People skip implementing and testing the downgrade side if the development model doesn't need it but the problem of what happens to the data is controlled by what you put in the "down" migration script. I'd guess if you can't throw the data away, you won't do a down migration, you'…
They do, and in every shop I've ever been in these are considered a trap precisely because they don't consider data loss.
Always roll forward. If you have to change migration history, restore a backup and lament past you's hubris.
Interesting, though I have no idea why the government is using AWS in the first place. This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns. We could build a public sector cloud and/or adopt a sensible on-prem approach. This requires funding, coordinatio…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS has a G-Cloud for UK just like they have one for US, no?
No. It is only relatively recently (~5/6 years) AWS have had any data centres in the UK. That blocked use of AWS for a lot of UK departments due to data sovereignty concerns.