191–200 of 210 posts
They don't just sent the notifications but store them? Sounds like it might contain PPI as it records passport extension data, etc. Might be minimal, though over 1 billion rows (400GB) sounds massive trove to keep around.
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Why? Do you deny the benefits of shared hosting in its entirety?
No. But I wish government agencies depend less on other entities. A government agency isn't in a business to make money. They should be concerned less with economic efficacy and more with accomplishing their goals. They have a fiduciary duty towards the citizens.
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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 :)
Did you ever run into a hard limit of statement size?
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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…
Because the government is not a corporation and it's obligations are different from the private market.
I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm trying to understand where the line lies (and whether that line is universal for all governments on all layers in all countries).
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Because the government is not a corporation and it's obligations are different from the private market.
So should a government (e.g. the police) produce its own cars, rather then buy them? Or set up a factory to make laptops? I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm trying to understand where the line lies (and whether that line is universal for all governments on all layers in all countries).
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…
> 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. If you think government needs and demands are predictable, you don't follow politics (particularly uk politics in the last decade). And then there are these things like pandemics that completely com…
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Why can't the UK government build there own cloud? It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?! I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just f…
I don't think you have any idea just how much it costs to run infrastructure at the reliability levels provided by AWS, and just how much investment it would require to get the ball rolling on this. A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.
My point is that NOT hosting it yourself (as a government) costs WAY more in the long run. See my points above.
The same goes for companies in Europe who literally host their trade-secrets (designs, sales, the entire company) on US-servers (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). The US is the home of their competitors. Who cares about infrastructure costs if you're PAYING to give your trade secrets away to your competitor(s)?!
We did a similar migration (somewhat larger database) with ~20 seconds of downtime and much less work... using the magic of AWS RDS Blue-Green Deployments [1]. Surprised they aren't mentioned in the thread yet. Basically, you spin up a new Blue Green deployment with any desired changes (in our case, we were upgrading Postgres major from 13 to 15). While your blue configuration continues to serve traffic, AWS uses log…