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Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk

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Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#51

Post by ElliotH »

oracuk wrote: post #48
csmuk wrote: post #3

Not impressed. I have nothing against Go (in fact I like it) but they seem to have built GOV.UK with every damn bit of technology there is available. I've seen Varnish, Go, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, Mongo, MySQL, nginx, rails, sinatra, Django and PILES of Not Invented Here. Also I'm not sure it's a great use of public money to build stuff like this when they should have nginx/apache up front and some configuration.…

The UK government is a 19th Century 'filing cabinet bandwidth' information architecture. The IT systems as always reflect the organisation structure that produces them. The data redundancy and unnecessary domain separation is frustrating and archaic. Uk.gov is just the cherry on the top of an old and creaky enterprise design that hasn't kept pace with changes to its mission or the world around it.

Actually the stuff GDS is doing starts from a clean slate and does away with much of what you are complaining about, in fact it is intended to fix a lot of it!

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#52

Post by csmuk »

anu_gupta wrote: post #46
csmuk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I understand that. We publish several huge legacy applications, several huge new applications, several integrations, public web site, documentation, online support. A mere 80-100 million HTTP transactions a day. Not once have we built something to do it all.

Prove it. Who do you work for?

I don't need to add leverage to the conversation by mentioning my employer. My arguments have merit on their own.

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#53

Post by CmonDev »

"Erlang, Go, Scala, and Clojure are all good fits and represent the current state of the art." - why is the choice so limited? It seems to be quite JVM-focused as well, I would consider F#/Nemerle as well. Erlang was invented in 1986 by the way - so a safe bet rather than "state of the art".

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#54

Post by urschrei »

csmuk wrote: post #49
threedaymonk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything can be realised with off-the-shelf technology plus time. Your posited solution further down the page would also have involved work in setting up the pool configuration and switching, so let's not pretend that it comes at zero cost.

It will come with proportionately less cost initially and over time though which is the issue. Efficiency is a major problem in government. Government should have a low financial impact on society where possible. A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect. But they didn't. They bu…

A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.

Is this some sort of Markov-chained free-market/El-Reg-at-its-most-prolix/libertarian experiment in satire? Well played!

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#55

Post by Toenex »

csmuk wrote: post #3

Not impressed. I have nothing against Go (in fact I like it) but they seem to have built GOV.UK with every damn bit of technology there is available. I've seen Varnish, Go, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, Mongo, MySQL, nginx, rails, sinatra, Django and PILES of Not Invented Here. Also I'm not sure it's a great use of public money to build stuff like this when they should have nginx/apache up front and some configuration.…

I wonder if the technology churn is more of an issue with the structure and organisation of GOV.UK rather than a technical one. In the post he states that the previous router was unmaintainable as there was no-one with a deep knowledge of Scala in the team and that this was the main reason for the re-write. Why was this allowed to happen? Is there a rapid/high turn over of staff or are teams moved around without regard for skill balance?

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#56

Post by mattmanser »

csmuk wrote: post #42
orf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and you are not a government agency delivering digital services to 60+ million people

No we're just handling that 60 million people's mortgages, insurance, financial status, financial history, legal and personal data instead...

Are you a price comparison site? Or Experian or Equifax perhaps?

Unless you clearly say you're not just some enterprise business that aren't exactly known for their technical competence this comment is totally ambiguous.

Do you just think you know what you're talking about, or do you actually?

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#57

Post by CmonDev »

rossj wrote: post #9
pjmlp wrote: post #6

So they are ditching Scala, because no one in the team is an expert, while replacing by a language that everyone has to learn?!?

I asked on twitter, and got a reasonable response. Investing in learning Scala is a much longer term thing than learning Go (which is, in their experience, a much quicker thing to do).

Because you always need to use all the features the language provides. Simpler -> limited.

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#58

Post by laumars »

daliusd wrote: post #13
csmuk wrote: post #3

Not impressed. I have nothing against Go (in fact I like it) but they seem to have built GOV.UK with every damn bit of technology there is available. I've seen Varnish, Go, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, Mongo, MySQL, nginx, rails, sinatra, Django and PILES of Not Invented Here. Also I'm not sure it's a great use of public money to build stuff like this when they should have nginx/apache up front and some configuration.…

It does not look that bad actually. Your list lacks Oracle, Microsoft technologies to really complain about inefficient usage of public money. I would love if my country used open source more.

Sadly UK local and national government projects are very much rotten with Oracle and MS solutions.

source: I used to work for local government

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#59

Post by mseebach »

orf wrote: post #34
csmuk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're incredibly easy to build. I notice you use puppet. That's enough tooling to push configuration out and restart services for nginx or apache+mod_proxy. You can break configuration out into separate files per agency if you need to. Varnish is different as that requires restarting. We do the same with commercial kit (Riverbed) with over 140 HTTP application endpoints and that is higher friction than the equivale…

and you are not a government agency delivering digital services to 60+ million people

"OMG we're the government and everything we do is huge and unprecedented so it is impossible for us to use off-the-shelf anything and we can learn nothing from best practises" is step 0 of every failed big government project.

There's significant thawing of that attitude (and gov.uk, for their imperfections, is definitely a very positive part of the trend) but the idea is alive and well.

Re: Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

#60

Post by danpalmer »

CmonDev wrote: post #53

"Erlang, Go, Scala, and Clojure are all good fits and represent the current state of the art." - why is the choice so limited? It seems to be quite JVM-focused as well, I would consider F#/Nemerle as well. Erlang was invented in 1986 by the way - so a safe bet rather than "state of the art".

F# and Nemerle are both based on the CLR, and unfortunately the performance of Mono is pretty bad, and not really suitable yet for high performance use-cases like this.

Also I'd Erlang is state of the art, even though it is so old (Haskell too), but I wouldn't call it an entirely safe bet because it requires quite a different style of programming and experience, so might not work well for certain developers.

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