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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

#71

Post by laumars »

danpalmer wrote: post #61
laumars wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly UK local and national government projects are very much rotten with Oracle and MS solutions. source: I used to work for local government

New legislation means local councils have to justify their requirement for Oracle/MS licencing costs over open-source/free software. They can still buy the licences if they can show they really need it, but loads of councils are now properly evaluating solutions like Canonical's OS/Cloud stack.

Sadly it's easy to justify because they just play the "this is a critical system and Oracle / MS provide round the clock support and quick resolution milestones" card.

I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen Oracle products bought based off the back of Oracle's keen sales people overstating the value of their post sales support.

Plus since there's so many redundancies happening in local government, they don't like train and retain skilled in house staff who would have been able to offer the same level of support. So 3rd party support is seen as more reliable than in house.

Lastly, many project managers push for such contracts because it means they can deny responsibility (ie if Oracle fucks up, they can blame Oracle. But if the system goes down and they're responsible for their own support, then the buck stops at the project managers). So you often get project managers push for such contracts just out of laziness.

There might be a case that this legislation might see more contracts signed with open source vendors who provide support, but local governments will always still have the argument that MS / Oracle are big trusted names where as a less known (outside of the world of IT) open source vendor may not be able to provide the scale of service that the government wants (complete BS of course, but all to often these decisions are made by project managers who know jack shit about IT)

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

#72

Post by oracuk »

ElliotH wrote: post #51
oracuk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If GDS was the IT department for the whole of government and the departments became a team of policy analysts and ministerial support then you'd be right.

Overwhelmingly the core information management and processing is on the local IT infrastructure of each department. GDS is unifying the web presence and some of the citizen identity systems, its not fundamentally taking over the core information systems of state.

EDIT: To be clear, I think something like GDS should take a long hard look at the core information systems of state and start again with a clean slate breaking the technology and the data out of the policy silos.

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

#73

Post by walshemj »

csmuk wrote: post #43
walshemj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd rather £900-£1000 /per diem consultants from Captita where doing a worse job?

That's a silly argument. I'd rather not be pissing an estimated £6400+maintenance up the wall on a project which could have been realised with off the shelf technology. Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny. An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.

£6400 wouldn't even pay for the coffee and biscuits on the typical UK government IT project.

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

#74

Post by walshemj »

mseebach wrote: post #59
orf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes because a real world organization with IT systems going back 50+ years is exactly like some me to macbook and MBA start up with two men and a pantomime horse in old street.

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

#75

Post by _pmf_ »

txutxu wrote: post #35

Something is wrong with this statement: "Scala is great for performance, but quite bad at resource usage" Maybe it's directly related to the next statement: "No-one in the core GOV.UK team had a deep knowledge of Scala, and particularly how the old router worked" But the first statement, literally, does not make sense on its own.

> and particularly how the old router worked

Oh, then it's OK. It's always reasonable and a safe bet to rewrite something instead of understanding how something works, because after all, your predecessors were a dumb bunch and you (using Go! how cool is that!?) obviously know much more.

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

#76

Post by csmuk »

walshemj wrote: post #73
csmuk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a silly argument. I'd rather not be pissing an estimated £6400+maintenance up the wall on a project which could have been realised with off the shelf technology. Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny. An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.

£6400 wouldn't even pay for the coffee and biscuits on the typical UK government IT project.

Nearly 4 duck houses though!

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

#77

Post by ElliotH »

oracuk wrote: post #72
ElliotH wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If GDS was the IT department for the whole of government and the departments became a team of policy analysts and ministerial support then you'd be right. Overwhelmingly the core information management and processing is on the local IT infrastructure of each department. GDS is unifying the web presence and some of the citizen identity systems, its not fundamentally taking over the core information systems of state. E…

I don't disagree with you, but change takes time.

Getting publications together in one place will be a great start (which is being helped by the public bodies transition).

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

#78

Post by orf »

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...

So you are handling a small set of related services to a large number of people. That's hardly comparable to the task of migrating 300+ (distinct) government agencies/services to the new system, along with whatever old systems they currently use.

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

#79

Post by Zenst »

thu wrote: post #7

That seems weird to me: * No one having a deep knowledge of Scala is mentioned as a problem, but they will learn Go. * They rule out a language because of its syntax.

I agree, but if you want to learn something today then GO would fit better for the task at hand and easier to learn. That and the cost involved is really good value given the training involved with learning Scala over GO.

That and I suspect there was some wishlists on what people wanted to do in the mix, like COBOL, still used but people just do not want to learn that as it is deemed so last century in comparsision to say java, though they are altogether different fish. Bit like the difference between a proxy and a router, what sounds better on a CV.

I suspect that from a maintenance aspect that the GO code will be much easier to support and grow as and when needed as well as scaleability.

Still it is most encouraging to see such a young language like GO get so much respect and use so quickly in a enviroment that has to many in the past and present been slow to adapts new technology. But there again many Govermental departments still have XP, albeit used as a fancy terminal to some old mainframe application that just ticks along.

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

#80

Post by mseebach »

walshemj wrote: post #74
mseebach wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes because a real world organization with IT systems going back 50+ years is exactly like some me to macbook and MBA start up with two men and a pantomime horse in old street.

Yes because a hipster startup in Old Street is the only kind of non-government entity that uses computers for anything.
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