[HN Gopher] Gov.uk Platform as a Service
___________________________________________________________________
Gov.uk Platform as a Service
Author : xd
Score : 193 points
Date : 2022-01-27 08:33 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cloud.service.gov.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cloud.service.gov.uk)
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| This is a good thing. But not for ukcloud, who are still the
| worst provider in this space.
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| Probably a bit unfair. They were early to the market and met
| all the usual UK Govt. paper-firewall rules well before the
| hyperscalers were viable options. It's just they haven't found
| a good fit in between the global forces of G.A.A and the legacy
| Fujitsu datacentre style approach and the Govt. has become
| somewhat more pragmatic over cloud for many workloads.
| dan_pixelflow wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual
| usable site. The GDS (Government Digital Service [0]) and the GDS
| (Government Design System [1]) - who run the posted link too -
| are doing a great job. Want to renew my passport? Easy, same
| UI/UX for getting a drone license, taxing my car and filing for
| benefits. Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to
| move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there!
|
| [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-
| digit... [1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
|
| Edit: Yes, I know the UK Gov's system for benefits isn't easy to
| understand. That's on the Gov, not GDS :)
| chippiewill wrote:
| gov.uk was great from the day it launched.
|
| It continues from strength to strength.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| not so much, some of the redesigns ripped out the usable data
| and replaced it with holding pages. Specifically to do with
| immigration, that hit us a couple of years ago.
|
| However its pleasing to see a site that works well on crappy
| computers.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The UK Design System's page banner takes up 70% of the vertical
| space on my browser.
| mkdirp wrote:
| > A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an
| actual usable site.
|
| In my experience gov.uk has been vastly superior compared to
| other websites for a long time. Gov.uk seems to be more
| consistent with _everything_ than most company websites are.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Yeah the British government's IT projects have a bad
| reputation but credit where credit's due gov.uk is really
| good in my opinion. I remember reading (probably here) that
| it was designed with a philosophy of 'our users don't have a
| choice but to use our software, so we must make it as un-
| infuriating as possible'.
| 0898 wrote:
| Agree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with
| the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something
| the UK can be really proud of.
| 12ian34 wrote:
| Agreed. I was delighted that my passport renewal process
| from first applying all the way to getting my new valid
| passport was about 12 days. The UK government's digital
| services is honestly a big factor in keeping me a UK
| resident
| toyg wrote:
| Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron
| government (although the conversation started under Brown,
| iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it,
| by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered
| directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since
| ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some
| great practices that continue to this day.
| Zenst wrote:
| I recall GDS being initiated for internal DOH stuff circa
| John Major, going into Blair era (yip was there when Blair
| took over the role).
|
| Not that I'd attribute it to any PM, believe it was driven by
| the government security services (which department/flavor I
| could not say).
|
| That all said, it may of been a different aspect but
| certainly has a longer story than told. With that, it started
| as an intranet project iirc.
|
| https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ has some insight but that
| seems more to cover the more public web aspects and even they
| say it is "a story" not "the story".
|
| So be fascinating to peace the "full story" and history
| together.
|
| GDS was a whole catchment in the early days, that included
| the phone services and that was contracted to Mercury telecom
| at one stage, or aspects were.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Communications
|
| If any credit should be laid, it would be upon the civil
| servants and associates that came up with the initiative, who
| sadly will probably remain nameless even if their names were
| known. Politicians just green light so much and claim credit,
| so much goes on behind the scenes of any government. With
| that, best think of politicians as orchestra conductors who
| depend upon musicians knowing how to do things, often able to
| do things right without eye sight of the conductors at times.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| There was a significantly renewed manifesto-driven push to
| open source/open standards with the coalition in 2010; some
| of gov.uk really is down to Cameron rejecting the
| (Microsoft/EDS/Fujitsu-heavy) approaches of the previous
| administrations.
|
| I don't really like giving them credit for anything but
| there it is.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Agreed and thank you for the memory jogging link:
| https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story-2010/
|
| Martha Lane Fox, bless her.
|
| And the brilliant Tom Loosemoore, also behind
| https://www.theyworkforyou.com/
|
| https://www.writetothem.com/
|
| https://www.fixmystreet.com/
|
| https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
| toyg wrote:
| What is there now was significantly rehashed under the
| first Cameron administration. I remember talking to a few
| insiders at PyconUK, around 2010-11, and they were saying
| they basically had _carte blanche_ to nuke it all from
| orbit and rebuild how they saw fit. The government wasn 't
| particularly popular at the time (what with the sweeping
| cuts to social services), but the people in question were
| adamant that, on digital services at least, the big guys
| really wanted to make a difference for good, and that it
| was a clean break from the past - hence why they were going
| to places like PyConUK to recruit motivated forward-looking
| people. That government effectively lasted 5 years, so they
| did a lot of work in that timeframe. I later heard through
| the grapevine that the waters got choppier after 2016, and
| I've not really heard anything after 2019 (beyond the
| occasional coded grumble on twitter), so I don't know how
| things are today.
|
| _> it would be upon the civil servants and associates that
| came up with the initiative_
|
| From what I understand, the power of this was precisely
| that it came from people _outside_ the career civil
| service. Although this narrative came from Conservative
| quarters (who occasionally indulge in civil-service
| bashing), I find it credible. Established powers in the
| system tend to have established friends among deep-pocketed
| vendors, particularly these days that doors tend to
| _revolve_ quite furiously. For all the good they did
| elsewhere, one undoubtedly bad legacy of the Blair-Brown
| years was eccessive trust on friendly vendors vs in-house.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the
| PM
|
| Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister
| need to be spending his time listening to a report direct
| from a team implementing software services?
| axg11 wrote:
| Gov.uk is _the_ primary way that anyone interacts with the
| UK government. Why shouldn't it be one of the highest
| priority aspects of government? I don't think the Prime
| Minister was sitting in on daily standups and sprint
| planning, but it makes sense that they should have a good
| overview of progress and development in GDS during its
| infancy.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| If there is an alternative approach that has been showing
| similar or better results, I'm ears.
| rswail wrote:
| Effectively it was in the PM's department directly, which
| means it was not subject to cross-department jealousies
| etc. Watch some series of Yes Minister, even though set in
| the 1970s and 80s, it's still all true.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| _The Thick of It_ is supposedly not far from the reality
| either.
| toyg wrote:
| Armando Iannucci is a national treasure and a credit to
| the Italian diaspora (and to Scotland).
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| If anyone deserves a knighthood for services to comedy,
| Iannucci would be one of my top contenders!
| toyg wrote:
| Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of
| civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes
| Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way
| "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture).
|
| With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried
| to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies
| from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take
| it up with the PM then?" and that would be the end of it.
|
| It's effectively the nuclear option, in terms of civil-
| service management, but sometimes it's the only way to get
| stuff done.
| heurisko wrote:
| The Cameron government learned the lessons of the massively
| wasteful failed IT projects from the Blair era (see Fujitsu
| NHS contract).
|
| The GDS started well, but I don't think the GDS can continue
| to cruise on its earlier reputation. It too has started to
| fall back into the bad old days of massively wasteful
| projects with unclear scope, such as the Verify system, that
| is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds for dubious
| benefit [1].
|
| "Unfortunately, Verify is also an example of many of the
| failings in major programmes that we often see, including
| optimism bias and failure to set clear objectives." [2]
|
| I think the idea of GDS is a good one, but evidently it needs
| to continue to reevaluate itself to avoid regressing into
| what it was originally setup to avoid.
|
| [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-
| with... [2] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-
| verify/
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Exactly, through recall this was Conservative and Liberal
| Democrat coalition government, so Nick Clegg (you might have
| head of him) may have a claim.
|
| Actually the credit should go to the brilliant and dedicated
| people in GDS doing great work; though I do not know enough
| to pick out names. The UI/UX and implementation was first
| class from the get go.
|
| As a Brit my life is made remarkably easier as a citizen and
| startup entrepreneur. The benefits to the UK ecomnomy are
| enorous but not measured. In contrast my personal experience
| of govt engagement when setting-up and running startups in US
| between 1991 and 2013 were painful. And would have been very
| painful without help (thank you YC).
|
| Finally if we are going to give leadership credit it should
| go to Francis Maude [0]. He happened to be my local MP, so I
| met him quite a few times, and he was most helpful and
| astonishingly effective in helping us navigate two big
| challenges we had in facing down, shall we say, "unethical
| quango-business partnerships". A remarkable, thoughtful man
| and effective operator, who was in government over three
| decades [1].
|
| [0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude
| gm3dmo wrote:
| +1 for Francis Maude because he definitely grokked it.
|
| Martha Lane Fox also deserves mention for: https://www.gov.
| uk/government/publications/directgov-2010-an...
|
| They all tore up the rulebook. The rule being: Government
| can't do computers. Outsource to favourite big consultancy.
| Twenty years were wasted on that nonsense approach.
|
| Some of the greatest resistance comes from the big
| departments who are actively hostile to many of the changes
| required to work in this way. There's a lot to be said for
| a round of golf at The Belfry with the splendid chaps from
| the IT consultancy your department spends PS2bn a year
| with.
|
| Golf days: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/abfe49d3-f
| 24c-4b93-b8e...
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move
| from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there
|
| Some important UK government services are still lagging behind.
| DVLA, since you mention it, has a mix of okay and truly
| appalling services. I'm in the position of trying to renew my
| driving licence after it was revoked for medical reasons. It's
| now six months since my cardiac arrest and I now meet the
| medically-fit-to-drive criteria. But, I face an 84 day delay in
| my application being processed, as detailed on the DVLA's 'how-
| slow-are-we-today' page [0], which is actually labelled as a
| COVID-19 update. Furthermore, I have to post a paper
| application form to them as they haven't yet digitized the
| medical review service [1]. This is life-wrecking stuff for
| anyone who needs a driving licence for their work or similar.
|
| I do like the gov.uk sites in general, but a lot of the back-
| office stuff is still disastrous. Some of this _is_ due to
| strike action and COVID, but a big part of the problem is the
| continual failure of the various UK Govt departments to
| successfully manage large IT projects.
|
| [0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-
| covid-19-update
|
| [1] https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-
| condition
| hughrr wrote:
| The (old) DVLA web site is merely a shallow front end for the
| 30 year old incompetent bureaucratic triangle of carnage that
| hides behind it.
|
| To get a decent result on _any_ IT project you have to fix
| the organisation behind it before you even think about
| replicating that organisation digitally.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix
| the organisation behind it before you even think about
| replicating that organisation digitally.
|
| Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I
| supported the MOD's system development (simulators for
| training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to
| develop some interoperability middleware between disparate
| systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying
| to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols /
| standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common
| requirements since may of them are doing very similar
| things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started
| working with the respective acquisition teams to get them
| to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why
| they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place.
| This turned out to be because there were multiple customer
| project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes
| in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each
| other at that level.
|
| I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of
| Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper
| briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned
| about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his
| training schools (which had multiple different types of
| simulator, each with out own through-life support
| programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-
| focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which
| was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple
| of decades working in this space.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Does the DVLA driving license service still only work during
| office hours? I couldn't believe they had an online system
| for renewing licences but it couldn't be accessed at night.
| Allegedly it's based on an ancient system that can't be
| trusted to be left running unattended.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Not actually tried this, as the online systems don't
| support the service that I need in the first place.
|
| Part of the problem is that they have multiple back-office
| legacy systems. I remember reading recently about a
| modernization of the personalised number plate system. This
| was apparently completely separate from the licence
| management so could be modernised quite easily. How
| convenient that it just happens to be a good revenue
| generator for DVLA, so presumably it was easier for someone
| to justify the development costs.
| somnium_sn wrote:
| I've moved from Germany to the US and then to the UK. gov.uk is
| by far the most impressive government website i've encountered.
| Accessible, consistent and just works. Really a good show of
| what a government website can offer if done right.
| llampx wrote:
| The German idea of an online platform is a website developed
| by Telekom (outsourced by them to the lowest bidder) which
| makes available the fax number of the Behorde, and the
| timings that the fax machine will receive incoming faxes.
| hughrr wrote:
| That's as German as you get. I'm sure there is a German
| idiom for _" that's how it's always been done and the
| change is someone else's fault"_ because that's the
| attitude. Had that a couple of times in shops. Business is
| bad because we're closed at peak times and that's the
| customer's problem. Business is bad because we don't accept
| cards and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad
| because our customers don't have fax machines these days
| and that's the customer's problem.
|
| Recently I was with a German friend and she nearly fell on
| her ass when I showed her that you can actually pay at a
| car parking machine in the middle of nowhere with Apple Pay
| here in the UK.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I still remember last time I visited. One Sunday morning,
| I went to the Backerei and tried to pay for my Brotchen
| and Stuckchen with my card and they just looked at me in
| disbelief. I quickly realized my mistake but it was too
| late. I had no cash so I left without any baked goods.
| jlelse wrote:
| Thankfully that changed since 2020. Now many bakeries
| accept cards.
| bertil wrote:
| Like a lot of users of the services of several government,
| gov.uk is consistently the best for many reason: simplicity,
| language clarity, accessibility, very lean design. There's a
| certain... brand, i.e. the four aforementionned qualities taken
| as far as possible, that I really like -- but not everyone
| enjoys the assertive use of screen space. Just remember:
| visually impaired people pay taxes too.
|
| But for web developpers, that's not all: it's very deliberate,
| there's detailed public guidelines, a scrutiny that developpers
| of the most popular open source project might recogonise. The
| overall result is that the people working there are very good.
| They are principled, and typically very complementary of the
| independent-minded polymath that many of us have worked with.
| They understand accessibility in detail and many dimensions
| (think: both rare handicaps and aging web-clients).
|
| I've worked with several and I would strongly recommend
| considering experience at the Government Digital service (GDS)
| as a very good signal on a CV, akin to senior role at a big
| tech, or early engineer at a successful start-up.
| rmvt wrote:
| off-off-topic: i've recently discovered (through a job listing)
| that the moj has been doing some open-source work around all
| the software they use to manage prisons and prison-related
| stuff. surprisingly interesting - e.g.
| https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api
| jsmith99 wrote:
| That organisation has a repo called Welcome People into
| Prison?! It even has a nice ASCII banner
| https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-
| in...
| nielsbot wrote:
| FWIW San Francisco is doing something similar. The have a
| digital services department and want to convert all city
| websites to the same design language:
|
| https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://medium.com/san-
| francisco-digital-services
| jpswade wrote:
| I wouldn't say quickly exactly, this has been years in the
| making, it's much better than it used to be.
| jayflux wrote:
| > A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an
| actual usable site
|
| Where've you been?
|
| Agree with your points but the things you mention have been
| around for almost 10 years now (driving license/passport
| renewal easy UX etc). I renewed my passport around 7 years ago
| and it was much easier to use then. It's true there's some
| services that tail off into the older systems (and you can
| tell), but the modern things gov.uk has owned have always been
| good since launch.
| adam wrote:
| We run the Cosmic Bazaar forecasting service (Economist article:
| https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/...)
| on their PaaS and their services and people have been excellent
| to work with all around. Friendly, professional shop.
| regularfry wrote:
| What's the actual platform like to work with?
| ilikerashers wrote:
| Very difficult to have a one size fits all unfortunately. There
| is a lot of variance around what a secure platform should do
| across government.
|
| There are already a ton of snowflake "single platform for X
| department" deployments.
|
| That said, I applaud the effort and hope it becomes the norm.
| 46Bit wrote:
| I worked on this for nearly four years. It's a great fit for a
| lot of government needs: they need a stable, reasonably secure
| platform that helps them build medium-complexity websites.
|
| It's based on Cloud Foundry, a "run your own Heroku"-type
| project. That's starting to show it's age now but it's been a
| great model and had major benefits in government.
|
| Happy to answer more questions.
| regularfry wrote:
| When you say "based on", how much is layered on top?
| severalbadgers wrote:
| (current PaaS person here)
|
| We've maintained the core Cloud Foundry experience, and added
| value around the edge with service brokers, good
| documentation, support, app autoscaling (using the CF-blessed
| autoscaler, which doesn't come "in the box"), some additional
| metrics, and a couple other bits.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Slightly OT: but how many badgers are we talking about
| here? This many?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
| denysvitali wrote:
| Also interesting to mention: if you use gov.uk's PaaS, then you
| can use the Hashicorp Waypoint [0] plugin for Cloud Foundry [1]
| :)
|
| [0]: https://www.waypointproject.io/
|
| [1]: https://github.com/swisscom/waypoint-plugin-cloudfoundry
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Looking at the fact it has S3 and SQS in the calculator this
| could just be hosted on AWS but with payment done via the
| internal budgeting stuff.
| ollybee wrote:
| It is hosted on AWS, from the features page: "The platform is
| hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK, "
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Yes exactly, it lets public sector teams / orgs quickly host
| something without needing experts or a load of red tape. It's a
| go-to approved hoster with internal government support
| available.
| guiriduro wrote:
| Looks like a decent CloudFoundry implementation, doing what its
| good at: keeping developer teams abstracted from lower level
| cloud infrastructure and orchestration internals.
| guiriduro wrote:
| Which looks to be available here with a MIT license :
| https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf
| motohagiography wrote:
| Very cool. Worked adjacent to something similar in public sector.
| If you are doing this for a govt, may I recommend you include the
| following services:
|
| - IAM Federation and brokerage service that takes arbitrary IDPs
| (every application is a simple document management problem at the
| tip of the iceberg, with a giant authN/AuthZ problem underneath.
| Consider authZ as a service as well)
|
| - HSM/Vault for standard secrets management across applications
|
| - Encrypted backup to data lake service, with cold storage
| option.
|
| - vulnerability scanning and patch management (lines of business
| can't be trusted to do application patching)
|
| - CI/CD pipeline service
|
| - Jira/ADO or other "standard" project collaboration scheme
|
| Managers don't usually know about this stuff, and they're the
| dealbreakers when you don't have them.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I had to deal with public administration in the UK, Italy, Spain
| and Sweden. The UK one is probably the easiest to use. You can
| definitely see that there is an excellent team behind.
| toyg wrote:
| There is one weakness, in my opinion, but it's not the
| service's fault as much as a national problem: identification
| is still messy. Whereas most continental administration have
| standardized on some sort of electronic-signature standard
| (which can be used to communicate safely and reliably as well
| as signing actual documents), the UK has not. The result is
| that the ID system is still excessively amenable to fraud and
| prone to problems identifying complex identities across all
| services.
|
| This seems to be a national issue though, akin to the rejection
| of ID cards.
| altacc wrote:
| I moved from the UK to Scandinavia and there is a BankID
| system that allows you to authenticate yourself for any
| digital service, public or private, and it's amazing how
| useful that is. I work in financial services and the ability
| to correctly identify a new customer removes a bunch of
| problems that we'd have elsewhere.
|
| The flip side is that if you don't want this ID it becomes
| more difficult (but not impossible) to access any digital
| service. It also relies on an integrated public population
| register, which some people have problems with. But it's not
| a physical ID that you can be asked for or are required to
| have, so doesn't have the ideological & political issues of
| requiring a universal ID card.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Italy has the SPID, Spain has ID cards with personal
| certificates since ages. I guess other countries have
| similar systems. The UK, with its reliance on "what is your
| date of birth" is the outlier really...
| GOATS- wrote:
| I did the opposite move, from Scandinavia to the UK - it
| wasn't easy to adapt to the various identifications methods
| here like GOV.UK Verify and other platforms versus just
| using BankID everywhere. It was also weird seeing how every
| bank here has their own authentication method!
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Agreed. In the UK with all the paranoia about IDs it's
| complicated. In Spain I got my first Https certificates
| (client side) in 2008 or even before. Their system are
| technically pretty cool, but UX is a mess. There is an
| initiative at EU level to have a common electronic ID, which
| would make a lot of sense, though probably not applicable to
| the UK.
| Shalomboy wrote:
| Damn, I wish the USDS was this robust :/
| t3rabytes wrote:
| https://cloud.gov/ is available to government customers to
| kind-of fill this need, not to the public tho. :/
| _joel wrote:
| gov.uk doesn't do PaaS to the public, either.
| hugoromano wrote:
| Sounds lovely but limits competition and innovation, promoting
| oligopolies. I admire the nerve of "10% Procurement fee". Wait
| until there is a guideline that demands the use of GOV.UK
| Platform as a Service (PaaS) for the UK Public sector. A sensible
| approach would have been a list of certified service providers
| and contact points for contracting.
| trhoad wrote:
| Individual Government departments (or more accurately,
| individual teams or even individuals) procuring their own cloud
| services and creating a technical and bureaucratic FUBAR
| nightmare is exactly the problem the Gov.UK PaaS aims to solve.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Do you realise this is the government building software for the
| government?
|
| That's like complaining that Amazon have a monopoly on hosting
| Amazon services.
|
| > A sensible approach would have been a list of certified
| service providers and contact points for contracting.
|
| No let's not for example ask the Forestry Commission to build
| or contract their own cloud services... that's not what they
| know about or what they're going to be good at.
| hugoromano wrote:
| In this case Gov.UK PaaS has a single vendor, AWS. I am in
| favour of multiple options, multiple vendors. The
| certification can be done by Gov UK agency that guarantees
| vendors up to spec. The current model "Forestry Commission"
| still needs to build, develop, define spec, buy and pay
| Gov.UK PaaS.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I would expect to see a 10% procurement discount, since they
| presumably have more negotiating power with AWS when buying
| PSPSPSPSPS's worth of stuff annually, rather than every
| individual government team setting up a small account for a few
| PSPS's.
| trhoad wrote:
| For that 10% fee, a Government department gets a whole host
| of DevOps support, all the contractual stuff dealt with, all
| the security vetting / compliance bits sorted out. The
| alternative is they can go and hire all those people to make
| that happen and it takes months or years and cost PS000's
| more than the fee!
| trhoad wrote:
| If anyone is interested in doing similar work at UK Parliament,
| we're on the same journey that UK Gov are on, although not quite
| as advanced yet so there's a lot of scope to shape what we're
| working on from an early stage:
|
| https://www.parliament.uk/about/working/jobs/
| chrismatheson wrote:
| And why exactly are my tax PSPSPSs paying for parliament to
| reinvent a wheel that GDS seems to have provided?
| reallydontask wrote:
| Enterprise architect at PS50-60k per year seems like a role
| that has been put on the jobs website to provide evidence that
| it cannot be filled and thus can go to a service company rather
| than an honest expectation of getting any realistic candidates
|
| Maybe I'm being too cynical
| trhoad wrote:
| I don't know about that particular role, but I can say that
| many people work in public service knowing full well they
| could probably double their salary in the private sector, but
| do it anyway. Mainly because of the large amount of annual
| leave and a pension that is unbeatable in the private sector,
| but also the opportunity to do really interesting work in
| genuinely unique environment, rather than work for another
| food delivery startup.
| reallydontask wrote:
| I am a civil servant and while it's technically true that I
| could double my pay in the private sector, I would likely
| be on the top 1 percentile or higher.
|
| I'd guess that salary is on the bottom 10 percentile for
| enterprise architects.
|
| Edit
|
| Pension is a good reason too, it is my main reason :)
| mpeg wrote:
| While I understand that some people want to work in public
| service because they find the kind of work more meaningful;
| I think those reasons are a bit weak.
|
| From what I can see, the annual leave for these roles is 30
| days per year, this is nice but 25 days is pretty standard
| in most tech jobs in the UK, with some employers allowing
| you to sacrifice salary in exchange for more days (+ or - 5
| days in exchange for equivalent days of salary)
|
| I know the pension plan for civil service is particularly
| good, but I wonder how it compares in terms of actual
| pension pay with having worked for big tech and contribute
| part of a salary that is, as you said, probably double -
| plus company contributions or matching which can be quite
| high (5-10%). Also, the RSUs you get and yearly refreshers
| kinda become your pension plan for a lot of tech workers.
|
| Life isn't all about money, but for most people money is
| the primary reason to choose one company over another.
| trhoad wrote:
| Then I would suggest the public sector probably isn't for
| you, which is fine! But clearly, many people do enjoy
| working there and are quite happy with a lower salary.
| reallydontask wrote:
| The fact that we struggle massively to recruit people and
| that there are teams with a majority of contractors would
| suggest that perhaps there aren't enough people willing
| to look at the tradeoffs and maybe higher salaries would
| deliver better value for the tax payer ( we get paid a
| lot less than contractors)
|
| Obviously anecdotal evidence regarding the above but
| still
| tutmeister wrote:
| Clicking through shows it to be on the low-end of that range,
| too, at PS50,870. While I work in government UX and
| appreciate there's a level of serving one's country and
| fellow constituents, that is simply not enough salary to
| recruit a highly-qualified individual. Especially considering
| government services are under constant attack by nation-state
| threat actors, we should be hiring the best individuals to
| protect parliament.
| ale42 wrote:
| "The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK"... (see
| the beginning at https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/)
| londons_explore wrote:
| But when it gets big enough, it might be worth the government
| spinning up their own hardware and competing.
|
| Are there any other cloud providers who have started by
| reselling another cloud providers products? Even as a reseller
| they ought to be able to make a decent profit by relying on
| volume discounts.
| jollybean wrote:
| "But when it gets big enough, it might be worth the
| government spinning up their own hardware and competing."
|
| Not really, this is not something we want governments doing.
|
| In Canada, we spent almost $1B on a simple gun registry - the
| equivalent of a few spreadsheets with a few million records
| with security overlay, and almost $1B on a Federal Payroll
| system that doesn't work.
|
| IT, particularly products, is one of those areas where
| budgets can go over by infinity, it's systematic white collar
| corruption.
|
| If AWS becomes less than ideal, there's maybe another service
| provider that can do it.
|
| Even this initiative, while laudable, may not be perfectly
| operationally ideal.
|
| Just like AWS actually has carved out a special government
| offering of their services, I believe a host of other
| providers should as well ...
|
| A PaaS/SaaS customized for a given domain, like a country,
| that built out basic identity services and privacy features
| given the local regulatory environment, would be ideal.
|
| Then the gov. can legislate, communicate, provide oversight
| while risking the fewest dollars doing the trickiest things.
|
| It's not entirely implausible that things can be managed
| effectively, Sweden has done some amazing things in
| particular with process and communication. But they are small
| and special and take 'design' seriously literally as a
| culture.
| _joel wrote:
| I doubt it, I worked on gcloud that provided several
| government departments access to our public cloud (and
| others, vetted and signed up to gcloud intiative) running
| openstack. They ended up going all in on AWS as it was
| simpler than managing multiple workloads across different
| cloud providers (not all Openstacks are the same!), oh, and
| DynamoDB.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| Probably not - this is probbaly done to ensure apps are
| hosted correctly, and conform to specific security
| requirements while also being easy to deploy and maintain.
|
| I doubt the UK government is interested in setting up
| competing infrastructure.
| pydry wrote:
| It will if Amazon keeps boiling the frog with pricing.
|
| Having a consistent platform like this also gives them
| negotiating muscle because if they wanted to up sticks and
| move completely it is much more feasible.
| jsty wrote:
| > Amazon keeps boiling the frog with pricing
|
| Do they?
|
| AWS's pricing may be eye watering in a few cases -
| looking at you egress - but one thing they definitely get
| right from my PoV is rarely if ever hiking prices
| manquer wrote:
| They don't change unit pricing if that is what you mean
| not even at very high volume.
|
| That means bill increases become costlier at scale as the
| volume discounts are not deep enough in a build vs buy on
| a pure cost basis (Lock-in, ease of use, reliability,
| talent reasons apart) at 100's of millions or billions
| spends governments do not to consider inhousing.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I went for an interview with GDS a few years ago. The interview
| itself was 5 hours long, which was gruelling, but it looked like
| a great setup. I'm not surprised they're doing well. (I got an
| offer, but turned it down in the end.)
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Heaven forbid we think you failed the interview
| Ostrogodsky wrote:
| blitzar wrote:
| Absolutely aced the interview, they offered me the role of
| the boss of the boss that I was interviewing for, a massive
| sign on bonus, a salary so large that it would have affected
| the debt to GDP ratio of the country and the biggest corner
| office they had. On my way out through the lobby everyone
| applauded, it was a great day for all.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Taxpayers of the UK ought to get free hosting with this platform,
| considering they already paid for it. Cut government spending if
| it has resources to do this sort of work. Government is not to
| provide business services.
| funshed wrote:
| Nothing is free, if they did that Tax's would have to raise to
| cover the costs. Plus this is not for busineses but for the
| Government Department(s) themselves and Quangos.
| teh_klev wrote:
| They're not services any old business can apply for, the
| service is aimed at other government/public sector
| organisation.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| While this makes complete sense I feel like I slept for 10 years
| and woke up in Looney Tunes universe where the Gov wants to sell
| you EC2 instances.
| toyg wrote:
| They are not selling it to you, but "public sector services".
| It's effectively the national government telling the various
| bureaucracies "hey, we got this cool service over here, easy to
| use and probably cheaper than what you are doing - give it a
| spin maybe?"
|
| In more "Napoleonic" countries the State would just mandate
| adoption and you'd never know it, but in the UK the public
| sector is awfully balkanized, so there is a need for public
| marketing.
| gtsop wrote:
| > awfully balkanized
|
| What does this phrase mean?
| igormilla wrote:
| > Balkanization is the fragmentation of a larger region or
| state into smaller regions or states, which may be hostile
| or uncooperative with one another.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization
|
| Applying this to a government you will have one where you
| have a lot of separate agencies that are hostile,
| uncooperative, and don't want to follow any unified
| standards.
| celticninja wrote:
| Which means it is not an accurate description as most
| agencies are not hostile to one another or uncooperative,
| its just that they are independent and have (sometimes)
| competing goals. They have no requirement to work
| together, but some are realising that there are benefits
| to doing so.
| toyg wrote:
| You can read that sentence in Sir Humphrey Appleby's
| voice for top comedic effect.
|
| Jim Hacker would have probably replied "So you're telling
| me they are not playing against each other, except when
| they _are_ playing against each other...? "
| [deleted]
| kinduff wrote:
| I've been following on GitHub all the effort behind these gov.uk
| sites [1]. It's pretty inspiring, I even wanted a job there.
|
| The developers behind this effort are great, and well, they use
| Ruby which is my language of choice at the moment.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/alphagov
| trhoad wrote:
| Not sure why this is here (it's been in use for a while), but for
| the uninitiated, the GOV.UK PaaS is an abstraction over AWS that
| helps to standardise what has historically been a fragmented
| approach to hosting applications.
| harel wrote:
| I've actually deployed on Gov PAAS, and as long as your stack
| conforms to the requirements it's quite a pleasant experience.
| was_a_dev wrote:
| Is the text rendering really poorly for anyone else? I've not had
| such issues on the goverment website before.
|
| The issue seems to be with Firefox, there's no issue in Edge. I
| assume Chrome would be fine as well
| jraph wrote:
| The page renders perfectly with Firefox on Ubuntu. Either
| blocking or allowing web fonts.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Looks fine to me on Ubuntu
|
| https://imgur.com/35cLwPH.png
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Looks fine for me. macOS Monterey 12.2, Firefox 96.0.2.
| pimlottc wrote:
| See also cloud.gov for the US Federal government.
|
| https://cloud.gov/ https://github.com/cloud-gov
| pcurve wrote:
| I wonder how their costs fare against the competition. (sorry,
| cloud space isn't my forte)
| https://admin.london.cloud.service.gov.uk/calculator
| rorymalcolm wrote:
| This is part of a wider suite of tools developed and run by the
| Government Digital Service including Notify (lets you send texts,
| letters and emails, https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/)
| and Pay (lets you take inbound payments quickly,
| https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/).
| petepete wrote:
| As a user, Notify is my favourite service ever. It's just so
| well designed, you can get up and running in about two minutes,
| and you can even use it to send yourself official looking
| letters in the post. What's not to love?
| rorymalcolm wrote:
| Totally agree, an unbelievably good service that does what it
| says on the tin in the best and most intuitive way.
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