[HN Gopher] Why we've decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
___________________________________________________________________
Why we've decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
Author : jpswade
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-07-12 10:28 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gds.blog.gov.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (gds.blog.gov.uk)
| asib wrote:
| They mention a handful of services like GOV.UK Notify, GOV.UK
| Pay, the GOV.UK Design System, the Prototype Kit, and the new
| GOV.UK Forms product.
|
| Is anyone able to clarify whether these things are collectively
| referred to or considered part of the Gov.uk PaaS offering (and
| therefore will all be decomissioned) or not? It wasn't clear to
| me from the article and I'm not otherwise familiar.
| severalbadgers wrote:
| Notify, Pay, Design System, Prototype Kit and Forms are
| unaffected by this news.
| revjx wrote:
| We use GovPaas for a few things. GovPaas provides the platform
| which we deploy our applications onto (under the hood it's
| Cloud Foundry).
|
| It is incredibly cheap for our use cases (as it turns out,
| unsustainably so for the team who provide it!). Our
| interpretation of this news is that we will need to migrate
| away to another platform.
| johneth wrote:
| I think the PaaS does not include them; it's the service for
| hosting a service.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| They're not, no. Think of PaaS as like Heroku, whereas Notify
| us more like Sendgrid (ie a SaaS) and DesignSysten is like
| MaterialUI.
|
| Most services are not using PaaS, but are deployed onto AWS or
| Azure and integrate with other services (notably Notify) via
| APIs.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| My understanding is those are services various government
| departments can make use of. Notify being to send notifications
| to people, Pay to take payments, etc. These are basically SaaS
| offerings from GDS to over government departments.
|
| The GOV.UK PaaS is a hosting platform for other government
| departments to host their own software in the GOV.UK managed
| platform (like a Heroku kind of thing).
|
| They're investing more in their SaaS services (Notify, Pay,
| Forms, Prototyping Kit, etc) and deprecating their PaaS
| offering in favour of Kubernetes, which looks like it may be
| offered as a managed service for government departments to use.
| It reads to me like more of a v2 of the PaaS but it'll now be
| kube based rather than whatever homegrown thing it is at the
| moment.
|
| Edit: as tnwhitwell pointed out below, the PaaS being
| deprecated uses CloudFoundry and isn't homegrown.
| tnwhitwell wrote:
| Just a small correction, it's not a homegrown thing, but a
| CloudFoundry deployment with a bunch of tooling around it
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Ah yes I missed that bit, thanks for the correction.
| boffbowsh wrote:
| Those were originally part of the GaaP (Government as a
| Platform) programme. The PaaS is explicitly just the Cloud
| Foundry-based deployment platform.
| dbbk wrote:
| No PaaS is only the hosting
| lupire wrote:
| tuukkah wrote:
| Key paragraph: " _In parallel, we are starting a piece of joint
| work with the Central Digital & Data Office, in partnership with
| Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) across government, to understand
| what a future central hosting offer could or should be. We don't
| know what we'll conclude, the options ranging from doing nothing,
| to creating a reusable set of configuration and management
| components (similar to the GOV.UK Design System, but for secure
| cloud hosting) all the way through to building a new PaaS v2
| using different architecture._"
| sakisv wrote:
| You'd think that this is something that would have be done
| before announcing the decommissioning in 18 months.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Indeed. Perhaps the purpose of this message was to let all
| the projects know they get no advice but a permission and
| freedom to migrate _anywhere_. After a while, there may not
| be anyone to use a PaaS v2 anymore.
| sakisv wrote:
| Something which won't exactly inspire confidence for any
| similar attempts in the future
| tvararu wrote:
| I've used the GOV.UK PaaS since the private beta. I was a user
| research subject and gave early feedback. I've used it on
| multiple projects since.
|
| As with Notify, the Design System, and all the other great tools
| that GDS produces, the PaaS is an absolute joy to use. Think
| Heroku, but built on top of FOSS, and with everything you could
| want to help you build the long tail of cookie cutter form or
| API-based government services.
|
| It's a damn shame GDS killed it.
|
| It's even worse they did so without providing a clear migration
| path. That sends a very bad message to other departments: GDS
| will kill things you depend on. They will also leave you high and
| dry when they do so. So don't depend on or adopt their tools.
| "Not invented here" has always been a problem in the UK
| government, this news only makes it worse.
|
| Colleagues of mine have staked their reputation on the line to
| convince legacy IT to let us use the PaaS instead of their own
| home-grown, poorly documented, and unsatisfactory solutions. Now,
| we look like fools.
|
| I love working in government. I love building accessible, robust,
| and user-centred services.
|
| I don't love: writing IAM policies, learning about what a
| "service principal" is, naming resource groups, having to open a
| support ticket to change an environment variable, having my
| password expire in the middle of an incident when I want to read
| logs, or spending more than PS50 a month of taxpayer money for a
| monolith with a database and a Redis. I had to do none of those
| on the PaaS.
|
| RIP.
| matthewcford wrote:
| Agree, I'm not sure how they can say with a straight face that
| people should use the other new forms services they are
| launching. If that is not profitable will it just be shut down
| in a few years too?
| mordae wrote:
| And this is how digital sovereignty of European nations ends.
|
| From this on, European public sector will be completely dependent
| on US.
|
| This effectively means no real separate foreign policy.
|
| At the same time when US balances on the edge of fascism abyss.
| wyuenho wrote:
| To be fair, Europe as a whole is 20-30 years behind on most
| fronts from the state of the art of information technology. The
| European governments have neither the will nor the capacity to
| invest in any large scale digital infrastructure or ecosystem.
| It's simply too late, the ship has sailed.
| ckolkey wrote:
| What? In denmark, we have:
|
| - Government issued MFA/SSO solution (nemid, now mitid)
|
| - Online tax filing
|
| - Drivers License/Health Card apps
|
| - Secure communications platform (e-boks) for official
| messages
|
| And thats just off the top of my head. The likelihood that
| the US catches up to this in any meaningful way is slim to
| none.
| nigma1337 wrote:
| I wouldn't really show off nemid/mitid as a shining example
| for digitalization in Denmark. Mitid came out already with
| security issues[1].
|
| I do agree that the 20-30 years behind is a gross
| overestimation, but acting like we're a shining example of
| modern IT is a stretch as well.
|
| [1] https://www.version2.dk/artikel/eksperter-saar-tvivl-
| om-sikk...
| ojhughes wrote:
| Can you renew your driving license online in the US?
| tallanvor wrote:
| Yes, although at least in Washington State you can only
| renew online every other time since they want you to come
| in and get a new picture taken every 12-16 years. Which
| isn't really unreasonable when you consider that's your
| main photo id.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Yes. Obviously depends on which US State you're talking
| about, however.
| wyuenho wrote:
| At the risk of getting further downvoted, let me enlighten
| the Europeans still awake reading this thread just how far
| behind you all are.
|
| Hardware:
|
| - All fabs are 20 years behinds leading edge
|
| - ARM, STM, and NXP are largely unable to manufacture their
| designs
|
| - Little capability to manufacture any electronics
|
| - Little ability to assemble any electronics
|
| - Increasing little capability to even design electronic
| devices. Logitech and a bunch of much much smaller niche
| firms are all that's left.
|
| - What was once the crown jewel of European communication
| technology - networking devices, are technologically wholly
| eclipsed by Chinese firms. You had to rely on Trump to save
| Nokia and Ericsson.
|
| - Besides a small microcontroller chip here and there, what
| other *components* on your computer or phone you bought in
| the last 15-20 years that's European? When was the last time
| you used a Nokia or Ericsson?
|
| - Not one PaaS that is wholly European and remotely approach
| the scale of American and Chinese PaaS.
|
| Software:
|
| - Most software are applications, very few is able to reach
| global scale. Besides Spotify and Skype, what else is a
| household name? Proton?
|
| - Inability to produce software infrastructure. No OS is
| European, no browser is European, no Cloud infrastructure
| such as databases, message queues, containers and so forth
| are European, not even a widely used protocol is European.
|
| - Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think they
| were just regulations.
|
| - Programming languages, there's Python, which never caught
| on in Europe until very recently. Congratulations.
|
| Europe has missed out on silicon, on PC, on the internet, on
| the Cloud, and now, on smart phones and cars. Since WWII,
| what Europe has been is essentially a knowledge worker pool
| for the Americans and the Russians, and largely the Americans
| since the Cold War ended.
|
| Europe as a whole can't even compete with Korea or Japan,
| nevermind America and China. Wake up.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| So, what you are trying to say is: "Please stop sending us
| your well educated and skilled people - we need to spend
| more money on our country and citizens, not absurd wages
| for tech"?
|
| That's super kind of you, I think Europe could get back on
| its feet with that kind of leg up.
| wyuenho wrote:
| What I'm saying is, at this point, Europe has lost the
| competition on so many waves of technological
| disruptions, there's simply no hope. The only thing
| Europe can do to gain back some international negotiating
| power is to invest in the next wave. Unfortunately, we
| can pretty much declare Europe has lost on AI, and good
| luck with hydrogen-based energy.
|
| The European brain drain to America simply will not stop
| until there's a complete ecosystem.
| kitbrennan wrote:
| I realise I'm just replying to a troll's cherry picked list
| at this point, but come on you're not even trying.
|
| All of those chips and fabs all rely on ASML? Those
| manufacturers you list literally couldn't make the chips
| they make without an EU company being the backbone of their
| work.
|
| You can't think of global scale European applications. SAP,
| the worlds third largest software company by revenue?
| Representative of the EU's tech sector, probably not, but
| it goes to show your either ignorant of the wider industry
| in the EU or being deceiving.
|
| > Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think
| they were just regulations.
|
| Turns out regulations can be a good thing? Our banking
| infrastructure 'just works', instantly, EU wide, with low
| fees and technology first.
|
| > Wake up.
|
| People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not
| as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good),
| healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them, proper mental health
| treatment so walking down a street isn't a gamble, great
| affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass
| shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some
| big companies. Good for you bud.
| wyuenho wrote:
| Speaking of cherry-picking. Which European fab is ASML
| selling to? Being able to manufacture one machine for one
| stage of the process doesn't make an industry. Europe has
| some great niche companies, but has a real problem
| fostering an actual ecosystem.
|
| Europe has sleep-walked into technological irrelevance
| since at least the early 2000s. In 10 years or so, all
| there's left in European tech that's competitive is going
| to be aviation, and agriculture and fashion if you count
| them as tech.
|
| > People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure,
| not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good),
| healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them, proper mental
| health treatment so walking down a street isn't a gamble,
| great affordable education, and the pleasure of not
| having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah,
| the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
|
| US tech workers have PTO, and Europe has mass shootings
| as well, and war and migrant crisis on the border.
| FANNG's profit is not just big, they are so massive, they
| dwarf many European countries' GDP.
|
| The truth is hard to swallow, but if Europe doesn't
| recognize just how far behind you are, you are never
| going to catch up, or even better, produce some
| industrial leaders once in a while.
| _joel wrote:
| Sorry, but that's absolute crap.
| dragoncrab wrote:
| In Hungary, you can digitally sign documents using your ID
| card or your online account at the local equivalent of
| gov.uk. Certificates are signed and managed by the
| government. Quite handy for everyday contracts like an
| apartment renovation.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > To be fair, Europe as a whole is 20-30 years behind on most
| fronts from the state of the art of information technology.
|
| This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a
| lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other
| parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern
| stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.
|
| Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows
| me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for
| a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my
| country) in seconds, completely free of charge and
| involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash
| App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in
| the EU, _because_ the governments stimulated and mandated
| large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| SEPA is good but not that good. It normally takes two days
| for my money to arrive, longer over weekends and holidays.
| The UK Faster Payments system actually does work within
| seconds most of the time, but only within the UK.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme introduced in
| 2017 introduced 10-second transfers. Not all banks are
| participating yet, particularly in (south-)eastern
| Europe, but it's a fast growing share, and in my home
| country (the Netherlands) just about everyone does.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| All of my SEPA transfers after 2017 took days and none of
| them involved banks in (south-)eastern Europe. But it's
| good to hear that things are improving.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I can transfer funds from my Finnish bank account to my
| German bank account and I get a push notification from
| the German one within seconds of submitting it. If your
| SEPA transfers aren't instant, it just means that one or
| both of the banks involved haven't just adapted it yet.
|
| Banks might also have only implemented receiver or
| sending, but not both. My mom can receive my instant SEPA
| transfers, but she can't send me one back since her bank
| has only implemented the receiving part.
| wyuenho wrote:
| Where do you think those digital infrastructure are hosted?
| Brometheus wrote:
| Well, where do you think those digial infrasture are
| hosted?
| wyuenho wrote:
| Increasingly on the big 3 American cloud I can tell you
| that.
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc? European clouds that don't
| gauge their customers.
| wyuenho wrote:
| I take this as a joke.
| vertis wrote:
| Agreed, there are so many areas where the US trails the
| rest of the world as far as technology is concerned. The
| Australian taxation system tech would probably be enough to
| make most US citizens cry for what they have to endure, and
| I'm not even sure it's the best one out there.
|
| Paying on credit card in the US was painful compared to the
| experience in Australia a few years ago. Australia had tap-
| to-pay everywhere and so many places in the US were still
| requiring swipe and signature (I mean WTF).
|
| I have found SEPA to be quite good. Australia has PayID as
| well which works well.
|
| To cherry-pick, Estonia is leading the world when it comes
| to digital government. It has been an absolute pleasure to
| use their e-resident system to run a company. They're
| fostering a startup ecosystem that is punching well above
| it's weight[0]. From autonomous delivery robots[1] to Wise.
|
| Government technology can often lag behind private sector
| technology, both from an inately conservative approach, but
| also because they have to care about things that often get
| ignored with private sector tech, like supporting everyone
| (e.g. robust accessibility).
|
| But to say that Europe is 20-30 years behind is just not a
| realistic view of the world.
|
| [0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonia-has-
| just-1-3-million-p... [1]: https://estonia.ee/delivery-
| robots-created-by-estonian-engin...
| tallanvor wrote:
| Technology isn't the reason the US appears to lag in some
| cases - business and governmental policy decisions are
| behind everything you list, and plenty of people don't
| like it.
|
| The truth is that 20-30 years ago Europe was lagging
| behind the US in some respects - credit card acceptance,
| computer usage in some businesses, etc. But obviously
| they're on par with the US today, and where they're ahead
| or behind the US the reason isn't access to technology,
| rather it's usually government policy.
| vertis wrote:
| It's quite nuanced, which of course the GP comment
| wasn't. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Government policy and societal attitude are two parts of
| the reason. It's not really fair to compare US and
| Estonia really, One is managing 350(?) million people and
| the other 1.3 million. Even comparing Australia to
| Estonia though, the differences in behaviour from the
| government entities are remarkable.
|
| Australia has a real "we're going to catch you" vibe to
| it's taxation and social services, where as, Estonia
| seems to really have an attitude of trying to build
| awesome things to make their citizens better off and to
| streamline things.
|
| Governments and their relationship to technology, both as
| a provider and also as a regulator is a complex beast. As
| you say, so many of the problems are manifestations in
| the imperfections of our democracies. Regardless of which
| AU, EU, GB, US all have flaws that we have to live with
| and work to improve.
| trasz wrote:
| It's not generalization, it's mistaking what layman think
| of technology (websites and apps, 90% of which are useful
| only for extracting investors cash) with what actually is
| technology.
| opsunit wrote:
| Estonia beg to differ: https://e-estonia.com
| vertis wrote:
| I beg to differ on Estonia's behalf. Estonia is awesome.
| Happy e-resident and Estonian company owner.
|
| Happy Wise customer, Happy Xolo customer. I love Bolt (when
| available).
|
| Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my
| head.
| yakubin wrote:
| As a European, to me US online banking and payments look like
| Stone Age technology.
| jen20 wrote:
| Given that the US still appears to think that cheques are the
| height of technology and part of a trivially researchable SSN
| is proof of identity, I'm not convinced that any sector
| besides surveillance capitalism is behind.
| personjerry wrote:
| Little bit of a stretch to go from "UK government website will
| use AWS" to conclude that "European public sector will be
| completely dependent on US"
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| We're not abandoning the idea, just the current project
| architecture. Reading more carefully, it's saying the
| architecture PaaS is currently built on is reaching the end of
| its days. It's natural to revise this after 7 years. Outcomes
| of the next round may be a new PaaS for government (and
| hopefully civil) deployments, with more flexibility around the
| cloud targets to allow hybrid on-prem, colo, and mixed cloud
| substrate. If anything that strengthens hybrid resilience
| against mono-cultures or foreign influence.
| InTheArena wrote:
| Um. You may want to tone this down a bit.
|
| The current solution is Cloudfoundry.
|
| On AWS.
|
| They are simply doing what every other CF customer is doing -
| realizing that the platform they chose to run on is dead.
|
| Last I looked, no one was holding a gun to any Europeans head
| saying "You must only use evil US software comrade!"
|
| In fact, I think it's a European who is holding a gun to other
| Europeans heads at the moment.
| whylo wrote:
| GOV.UK PaaS always ran on top of AWS (though in UK and Ireland
| regions), so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway
| naasking wrote:
| > so it's always been dependent on a US company anyway
|
| I'm not sure large multinational corporations belong to any
| specific country at this point.
| yunohn wrote:
| If anything, they belong to the governments that offer the
| best tax rates and least liability. For FAANG, this often
| means the Ireland + Netherlands.
| mellavora wrote:
| should be:
|
| I'm sure specific country belongs to large multinational
| corporation at this point.
|
| There, fixed it for you :)
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian
| sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations
| absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.
|
| Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure
| pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic
| policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but
| things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could
| become huge problem.
| naasking wrote:
| > One thing that became extremely clear after anti-
| Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational
| corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set
| of countries.
|
| "Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no.
| If every nation except the US allied with Russia over
| Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out
| of Russia.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| US can force Microsoft or Google to pull out of UK in the
| same way Russian government can force Gazprom to stop
| selling gas to Germany. Again it's unlikely in current
| geopolitical situation but imagine that fascists or
| communists come to power in US (both are non zero
| probability). If there is one thing that history teaches
| us is that alliances are unstable.
|
| Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia
| - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with
| US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend
| time in jail.
| capableweb wrote:
| Is there any Europe-based PaaS currently operating, that are
| noteworthy? Most companies seems to be US-based.
| netgusto wrote:
| There's https://scalingo.com/ Works well.
| eastbound wrote:
| Is OVH a PaaS?
| jonatron wrote:
| If Managed Kubernetes counts as a PaaS, maybe?
| https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/public-cloud/kubernetes/
| jeromenerf wrote:
| "Europe based": yes, we are french.
|
| "Currently operating": yes, steadily, for seven years now.
|
| "Noteworthy": yes, I really hope we are, at least, we have
| been quite newsworthy recently
|
| "Most companies seems to be US-based": well, we have US
| employees and we are running on top of US based companies
| infrastructure, amongst others.
|
| o/
|
| --
|
| platform.sh
| capableweb wrote:
| "If I sign up to your service and deploy stuff to one of
| your Europe-based data centers, will my data ever land on
| a US-based company's servers?" [______]
|
| Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the
| service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended
| up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers
| (fonts.googleapis.com).
|
| Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem
| too privacy-aware so gonna have to find something else.
| genousti wrote:
| It will. As long as the company does business in the us
| then american governmenet can force access to data hosted
| somewhere else. They did it in the past theyll do it
| again
| tazjin wrote:
| Yandex, I guess.
|
| You also have a variety of smaller providers hosting
| OpenStack, which gives you some platformy services.
| Hamuko wrote:
| If you count Russia to be European, which is debatable
| from both a cultural and a geographical perspective.
| Yandex only has one data center outside of
| Russia/definitely in Europe, and last I heard, they
| needed 600,000EUR worth of diesel per day to keep it
| running.
| trasz wrote:
| Russia is definitely not European from business
| perspective; it's closer to North Korea now.
| Veen wrote:
| I understand the intent of the question, but in this case a
| UK-based alternative would be preferable, not just a
| European alternative. The UK is more likely to find itself
| at odds with France than the U.S.
|
| That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of
| Yes Prime Minister:
|
| > Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear]
| weapons.
|
| > Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?
|
| > Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.
|
| > Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the
| government!
|
| > Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that
| unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us
| from the Russians, won't they?
|
| > Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?
|
| > Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.
|
| > Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!
| capableweb wrote:
| > but in this case a UK-based alternative would be
| preferable
|
| For you maybe, but not for me :) I just took advantage of
| the threat to ask a slightly unrelated question (although
| parent mentioned Ireland as well, so maybe slightly on
| topic at least)
| yannski wrote:
| Scalingo https://scalingo.com is basically a french Heroku-
| compatible PaaS based on a reliable french IaaS (Outscale,
| cloud subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, the famous maker of
| Catia, Solidworkds, etc)
| sofixa wrote:
| There's Scaleway that provide managed Kubernetes and also
| "serverless" (containers or functions as a service, based
| on Knative).
| rorymalcolm wrote:
| I feel the biggest PaaS offerrings in Europe are internal
| deployments within the enterprise!
| fbn79 wrote:
| Lidl (germany supermarket company) backed STACKIT?
|
| https://www.stackit.de/en/cloud/products-services/
| harry-wood wrote:
| Memset is based in the UK. Used them a few years back, but
| I'm afraid we moved to AWS after a few too many reliability
| issues.
| chadwcarlson wrote:
| Platform.sh is another (employee here). We're a French PaaS
| and DevOps platform. So we provide hosting, but also every
| bit of operations needed to provision infrastructure and
| true staging environments for every pull request/branch
| with just a `git branch`. We work with Azure, GCP, AWS for
| 9+ regions across the globe, many of those in Europe. This
| has allowed us to also provide the backend for OVHCloud's
| WebPaaS (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/web-paas/) behind-
| the-scenes.
| [deleted]
| atwood22 wrote:
| Don't feel bad. Europeans have a much better work-life balance.
| Plenty of parental leave. A culture that prioritizes life
| outside the office. Six weeks of guaranteed vacation that
| people actually take. Etc.
|
| Those things have a price. Namely, when people work less, less
| innovation happens, which means less productivity growth
| happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on. I
| lived in Germany for two years. I absolutely loved it. However,
| despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say
| prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
| maccard wrote:
| > Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens,
| which means less productivity growth happens, which means
| less innovation happens, and so on.
|
| That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that
| a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime
| is incredibly important for mentally intense work. Work
| smarter, not harder and all that. Productivity isn't tied to
| time spent in office - my experience with american offices is
| that they encourage people to hang around, spend time there
| with meals, etc. That's not productive time, that's time
| spent in the office. Similarly, innovation doesn't come from
| time in the office, it comes from collaboration, experience,
| thinking outside the box.
|
| > However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I
| would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
|
| I don't think this is a fair statement. The US prioritizes
| butts-in-seats, workplaces where you're competing against
| your peers, system where the power imbalance between an
| employee and employer is heavily stacked in favour of the
| employer. That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work.,
| and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't
| prioritize work.
| atwood22 wrote:
| > That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having
| that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk.
| Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work.
|
| I agree but I think you'll find that working usually
| contributes economic value. Not working usually doesn't.
| The key word being _usually._ if you're in doubt, just try
| to record the economic value delivered by your downtime.
| How many hours are idled for every a-ha moment? Not that
| there is anything wrong with idling...
|
| > That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it
| definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize
| work.
|
| I'm using productivity as a measurement. Ideally,
| productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing
| inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more
| productive in this sense, so it's more than just butts in
| seats.
| ar0 wrote:
| > I'm using productivity as a measurement. Ideally,
| productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing
| inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more
| productive in this sense, so it's more than just butts in
| seats.
|
| Actually, the differences are quite small and in 2017
| Germany overtook the US in labour productivity:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-
| per-ho...
| atwood22 wrote:
| That data is adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
| So in real dollars Germany did not overtake the US.
| temac wrote:
| Economic value has no strong meaning. When you mow your
| lawn yourself, does this action have economic value? If
| so, why is it not measured? If not, why does it have if
| you hire someone to do the work for you? Likewise for
| some jobs that are quite country specific: do old people
| who need a job to survive have more economic value than
| old annuitant people who can take care of their grand-
| children? What about reading a book? What about then
| discussing about said book with others? What if that
| discussion makes some students better? What if you are a
| teacher? What if you are a benevolent? What about writing
| a novel that would have had tremendous economic value if
| published but keeping it to yourself? What if that novel
| is then published after your death?
|
| Productivity has no strong meaning either. How do you
| measure it? GDP PPP / worker / hour? What if it actually
| depends on externalities like the amount of carbon
| released in the atmosphere? What is actually a worker
| (back at the what is "work" and "economic value" point)?
| What if it counts destroying then rebuilding things (as-
| is)? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses?
| What if it counts absurdly high health expenses coming in
| part because some people illegal pushed for addictive
| drugs to be way over-prescribed by corrupting physicians?
| mattkrause wrote:
| This is only true to an extent.
|
| During WW1, the British "Health of Munition Workers'
| Committee" collected some fascinating data on production
| and working hours from armament factories. These were
| fairly motivated workers, doing semi-skilled manual tasks
| where you'd expect productivity to scale linearly with
| time on the job.
|
| Moving from 25 hours/week to 30, 40, or 45 hours did lead
| to a proportional increase in output, but it then begins
| to plateau. Teams working 7x 10 hour shifts produced
| about as much as those working 8x6.
|
| Check out the first few figures of Pencavel, J. (2014).
| The Productivity of Working Hours. _The Economic Journal_
| , 125(589), 2052-2076. Portico.
| https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166
|
| Data collected from American workers during WW2 showed a
| similar pattern. I'd expect that "creative" work has an
| even smaller linear range, but I'm not aware of any
| studies.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > I agree but I think you'll find that working usually
| contributes economic value.
|
| That's unimportant, though.
| maccard wrote:
| By that logic economic value is only created by active
| work, and not by any of the thought process that goes
| into it. That's an asinine thought process.
| atwood22 wrote:
| Yes, value is created by work. The asinine thought
| process is to somehow suggest that a meaningful amount of
| economic output is intangibly created by _not_ working.
| Economic output isn't the end-all-be-all metric to use
| for life. But it's a little crazy to suggest that you can
| move this particular metric by doing nothing in
| aggregate.
| the_other wrote:
| > I agree but I think you'll find that working usually
| contributes economic value.
|
| _Some_ people have to be "not working" in order to make
| use of all the other areas of the economy - shops,
| transport, leisure centres, clubs, nightlife, the arts,
| self-care (beauty, massage, counselling etc). That's a
| fairly large slice of the economic activity in many
| countries.
| atwood22 wrote:
| Sure, but they can't spend more than they make, and they
| can't make more than they produce. Obviously this might
| not hold true for every individual, but it holds true in
| aggregate.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yet Germany is the 4th largest economy in the entire world
| with a GDP of near 4 trillion US dollars, despite being a
| country of only 83 million people (only the 19th largest
| country in world). Perhaps the Germans have figured out how
| to work smarter, not harder...
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| OK, but the state of California is the fifth largest
| economy in the entire world ($3.4T USD) and has less than
| half the population of Germany.
|
| Arguments like this are pointless.
| atwood22 wrote:
| U.S. productivity is higher than Germany (outputs /
| inputs), so it appears Germany hasn't quite figured out how
| to worker smarter than people in the U.S.
| [deleted]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah, but how much of the value that this is based on is
| artificially inflated, either by outright bullshit such
| as HFT and other forms of "wealth" that are solely
| created out of numbers or to account for indirect
| bullshit such as absurd healthcare and rent costs that
| drive up wages and, indirectly, product prices?
| andrekandre wrote:
| > artificially inflated
|
| a huge chunk of that is excessive healthcare costs
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-
| expendi...
| corrral wrote:
| Yup. My back-of-envelope from past looks at this is that
| 5-10% of US GDP is _purely_ drag from excess healthcare
| costs, i.e. we 'd collectively be better off and our
| economy (entrepreneurship, especially) healthier if that
| amount of our GDP simply _vanished_ , even though it
| would mean lower GDP per capita.
|
| There's a quote from Obama in an article from The Nation
| years ago, that basically says we can't fix our
| healthcare system properly because it would put too many
| (white-collar make-work jobs program participants,
| essentially, under our current system) people out of
| work.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Europeans have [...] Six weeks of guaranteed vacation that
| people actually take._
|
| That is false. EU mandates minimum 4 weeks of PTO across all
| members but varies wildly according to country, sector and
| company.
|
| In most EU countries I've seen the average tends to hover
| around 5 weeks while 6 weeks or more is usually for very
| generous employers trying to attract top applicants in
| employee friendly countries.
|
| I get you're attempting a jab at Americans by flashing large
| number of PTO, but let's be realistic that 6 weeks is not the
| norm in for all jobs in the whole of Europe.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Six _days_ PTO would still be a jab at Americans.
| tchalla wrote:
| > 4 weeks of PTO
|
| There's vacation and sick leave in most of EU. PTO is an
| acronym used in the US and the concept doesn't apply in
| Europe.
| atwood22 wrote:
| You're not including bank holidays. The UK, for instance,
| has 20 days + 8-10 bank holidays. Italy has 20 + 10.
| Germany has 20 + 10. Denmark 25 + 11. France 25 + 11. Spain
| 22 + 14. Finland 25 + 11. I could go on...
| what-the-grump wrote:
| So we should all be learning Chinese by your logic?
| KronisLV wrote:
| > So we should all be learning Chinese by your logic?
|
| I fail to see how admitting that certain countries have
| particular qualities that make them less competitive in a
| given industry and thus make it more economically feasible
| to use the solutions of other nations, means that they
| would become dependent on another culture/language.
|
| I mean, exploring new languages and knowing a few polite
| phrases is generally a good idea, even if you don't find
| the idea of learning a new language fun/useful personally.
| That said, it's not like it's required either: people who
| shop on AliExpress don't need to know Chinese by any means.
|
| Globalization (and thus getting out-competed in certain
| respects) is kind of inevitable nowadays, though admittedly
| it would be really cool to see European alternatives to AWS
| - I mean, Alibaba Cloud and Yandex Cloud seem to prove that
| it's at least somewhat feasible to explore something like
| that and companies like Hetzner and Scaleway seem to also
| prove that the infrastructure aspects are basically
| covered.
|
| All that's missing is the platform around it, as well as
| all of the complexity and development that would come with
| setting out to make something like that.
| trasz wrote:
| You're conflating innovation with office work, while in
| reality it's often - or mostly - the inverse: the work
| patterns typical for software industry hurt innovation,
| replacing it mindless repetition - see the vast majority of
| software startups.
| tarjei_huse wrote:
| This may cut both ways with regards to innovation. For
| example, Europe as come way longer than the US when it comes
| to automation in various sectors (see f.x. the recent
| Economist article about inefficiencies in the US retail
| sector).
|
| The main US advantage wrt to the last generation of tech
| giants (i.e. Google, Facebook and Amazon) is language. You
| will reach scale far faster in the US than in Europe because
| you do not have to translate your product to new languages
| and markets. Thus the US giants reached scale before similar
| European products could compete.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > We also need to operate with a growth mindset in GDS
|
| Is it just me or is it weird to see "startup speak" from gov
| agencies?
| eterm wrote:
| That's not startup speak it's "business consultancy" speak and
| the UK goverment loves to hire business consultants to tell the
| uk civil service how to work.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| It is however desirable to see compared to what came before.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Also though... the actual content, why? Why does GDS need to
| operate with a "growth mindset"?
| [deleted]
| eterm wrote:
| Cynically it can be seen as part of the war on introversion.
|
| Consultancies rebadged introverts as having a "fixed mindset"
| and extroverts as having a "growth mindset" and then labelled
| having a fixed mindset as a terrible thing.
|
| But that criticism is demonstration of a "fixed mindset" and
| therefore should be discarded and should be ignored.
|
| That's the cynical take. The less cynical take is that having
| an open mind helps businesses and services adapt to their
| needs.
| wtetzner wrote:
| It's not clear to me how "growth mindset" equates to
| "having an open mind".
| heurisko wrote:
| They qualify their usage of business-speak:
|
| > Our growth strategy is obviously not about making profit,
| but we are a small team at the centre of government and we
| need to make sure our people and our money are focused on
| services that have the biggest reach and the most impact.
|
| It's not quite Fry and Laurie yet. "Oh, you have shares in
| the Royal Family?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4
| [deleted]
| lupire wrote:
| 40four wrote:
| I think it has to be intentional, but if not it's still funny :)
|
| > "Over the same period departments have built better and more
| expert in-house cloud engineering capability, and are (broadly)
| _clustering_ around a Kubernetes based architecture."*
| loafoe wrote:
| Another Cloud foundry based platform moving on to Kubernetes.
| Perhaps https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s can provide a
| simple migration path..
| severalbadgers wrote:
| Have you seen Korifi? https://github.com/cloudfoundry/korifi
|
| This is the one I expect to become the primary CF product on
| k8s
| loafoe wrote:
| Ah, another one! On the other hand, if you've already
| containerized your app and are not using buildpacks, the
| switch to Kubernetes should be fairly easy. Thanks for the
| link, will check.
| trasz wrote:
| >The big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP and others) have upped
| their game
|
| So now UK citizens are going to be forced to use services from a
| country known for largely non-working legal system (where being
| provably innocent is not enough to call off execution, see
| Scalia; where a monetary fine is an adequate sentence for
| premeditated murder, see OG Simpson, not to mention de facto
| legal immunity for cops committing crimes on duty) and for
| droning random civilians with impunity (see Hague Invasion Act).
| jon-wood wrote:
| Large parts of GDS already run on AWS, and I think that may
| even have been the case for PaaS itself.
| _joel wrote:
| I know HMRC went all in on DynamoDB when I was working
| indirectly for them via a provider. This was in 2017.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| No way they finally moved the NI db off of sybase?
| severalbadgers wrote:
| Yes, GOV.UK PaaS runs atop AWS.
| corrral wrote:
| > OG Simpson
|
| It's OJ, but thanks for giving me the perfect stage name for my
| 90s-pop-culture-themed hip-hop act.
| angio wrote:
| That's a feature. The UK can ask the US to request data to AWS
| about UK citizens without breaking any law about spying on UK
| citizens. Now they can filter all citizens that ticked "muslim"
| or "arab" in one of the many gov forms, cross reference with
| fb/twitter/insta for signs of extremism and flag them as
| suspicious individuals.
| rambojazz wrote:
| I don't get it, are they saying that public organizations should
| move to using AWS/Azure/GCP?
| iasay wrote:
| Well they sort of do already. There are armies of consultancies
| queuing up to provide packaged solutions far above the cloud
| infra level solutions abstractions that GDS offer. Those guys
| use commercial clouds.
| _joel wrote:
| No, not at all. They released services and software to make
| integrations easier on these platforms but the toolset is
| becoming stale and more effort goes into k8s (on several
| different clouds, depending on project)
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| In a way, it could be interpreted like that.
|
| It's another way of saying "maintaining infrastructure isn't a
| task of a public service." Generally, the "why/why not" tends
| to be answered with: "A public services can never provide a
| similar value proposition compared to private vendors." which
| isn't really an answer to the question.
|
| One problematic aspect is that public entities don't just rely
| on infrastructure, but also on an entire stack of in-house
| expertise that provides support and understands the specifics
| that come with the problem domain - e.g. legal compliance,
| accountability,... - of providing public services online.
|
| So, barring an alternative, this would effectively mean that
| public services would have to source consultancy themselves on
| the private market to set up / maintain their applications on a
| private cloud on a per-project basis. Both of which are easily
| a factor more expensive compared to a shared platform /
| framework / solution where resources and expertise can be
| pooled together to provide affordable and secure services
| towards other branches of the authorities.
|
| Oddly enough, they seem to be all to aware of that conundrum:
|
| > In parallel, we are starting a piece of joint work with the
| Central Digital & Data Office, in partnership with Chief
| Technology Officers (CTOs) across government, to understand
| what a future central hosting offer could or should be. We
| don't know what we'll conclude, the options ranging from doing
| nothing, to creating a reusable set of configuration and
| management components (similar to the GOV.UK Design System, but
| for secure cloud hosting) all the way through to building a new
| PaaS v2 using different architecture.
|
| Personally, I believe this is a decision based on cost. The
| cost of keeping centralized hosting infrastructure based on old
| technology online, or migrating towards new technology, is just
| too steep and can't be readily justified anymore in 2022
| compared to what the private market offers. Perhaps most
| surprisingly: there's no clear short-term plan B for all those
| entities relying on this service.
|
| If I were managing a few projects from some department, I
| wouldn't be happy learning that I'd now have 18 months to
| scramble, figure out how to move forward, find funds, write a
| project proposal, align all stakeholders, source consultancy,
| etc. without going offline for a prolonged time.
| matthewcford wrote:
| Given they charged a markup on AWS costs, I find that it's
| weird they did not manage to at least break even. Other
| departments switching to running on their own cloud account
| rather than use the PaaS could be the main reason, and that's
| partly due to the PaaS/Cloud foundry stagnating.
| benj111 wrote:
| I wish this were spread to other government IT things.
|
| The NHS uses a patchwork of different systems. Why should every
| hospital have to sort out its own IT needs. Let the NHS do NHS
| things and have an IT branch providing standardised software for
| everyone.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Large government IT projects end up being done by companies
| expert in extracting as much cash from the government as
| possible. The end result is the product doesn't work properly
| and is massively over budget. Then the government is forced to
| hand over even more money to redesign bits to work better.
|
| The government has been bitten by this many times, so now shys
| away from big IT systems. Instead every department has to build
| its own, usually with lots of Excel sheets and macros involved.
| regularfry wrote:
| The move at the moment is for central orgs to specify
| standards and protocols so it doesn't matter who implements
| them and the delegated authorities can buy from whoever. That
| goes some way to preventing both one-big-vendor setups and
| unstandardised fragmentation, and it was blindingly obvious
| to anyone who's ever implemented more than a bash script that
| it was the correct approach even 20 years ago. Only it's
| taken a generation of civil servants ageing out at the top
| end to make it happen.
| jen20 wrote:
| This is largely what Connecting for Health attempted, and the
| only good things that came out of it were intangible to most -
| N3 and the UK SNOMED extensions.
|
| Unfortunately this was largely down to incompetent
| consultancies, and a focus on providing what management wanted
| rather than what clinicians wanted, and it has absolutely
| poisoned the well with regards to information technology in the
| NHS.
| matthewcford wrote:
| I was the first user of the GOV.UK PaaS for a production service
| - GOV.UK Trade Tariff [0]. It's unfortunate that it has come to
| this, and as others have pointed out, the blog doesn't instil
| confidence about using other GDS services in the future.
|
| Procurement in government is painfully slow, and that's one thing
| that the PaaS excelled at, all departments could get set up
| immediately.
|
| I hope when making their financial assessment, they included the
| saving that all departments using the PaaS are making not in
| infrastructure but ops. Each service will increase ops spending;
| there isn't a comparable managed platform for UK GOV services, so
| each service will have to increase its devops support costs. I've
| used Google Cloud Run and AWS Copilot, and both are far from
| stable enough, in my opinion, for production use.
|
| My only hope is that they revisit this decision, but it seems
| likely we'll have to move the services we manage off.
|
| [0] https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/trade-tariff-moves-
| to-g...
| robga wrote:
| The June 2021 assessment [0] of the service notes that "the team
| will never be able to fully recoup their cost through a recharge
| model so will need to rely on centrally provided funding. This
| poses an important risk to the longevity of the product, as it is
| *dependent on political buy-in and budget from the Treasury*".
|
| [0] https://www.gov.uk/service-standard-reports/gov-dot-uk-
| platf...
| banach wrote:
| A pathetic example of the ideological myopia that plagues
| Europe these days. States have provided services to their
| inhabitants since prehistory, and the notion that this
| infrastructure does not need financing is as healthy as a
| corporation that thinks it does not need to invest to succeed.
| At best, this strategy of living off of investments made by
| previous generations is doomed to underperform compared to
| states that take an active role in their own development.
| noahtallen wrote:
| We don't even have to zoom in on Europe. In the US, it's
| quite common for folks to expect public services (like public
| transit or even the USPS) to be profitable. Which means these
| services don't get the investment they really need.
| userabchn wrote:
| If it was providing a service of as much value as was being
| spent on it, then why shouldn't it be profitable?
| orev wrote:
| Having a profit motive drives a behavior of raising
| prices as high as the market will bear. That inherently
| excludes citizens who cannot afford to pay the "most
| efficient" price, who are often the ones who need the
| service the most (e.g. busses and other public
| transport). That reduces the ability for society to
| operate as a whole. If someone can't afford to get to
| school, or to an entry-level job, how will they ever be
| able to move up in skills and pay? Who will the high-end
| electronic store sell their products to if people can't
| afford them?
|
| Municipal services are meant to serve as many citizens as
| possible, not to extract as much profit as possible,
| because it's an overall benefit to everyone.
| Aloha wrote:
| I don't know if this is a European wide problem or just a UK
| one.
| philpem wrote:
| It certainly seems worst in the UK.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Definitely applies to Germany. Our infrastructure is deeply
| fucked and we missed all the chances to innovate after 16
| years of conservative rule, but the balance sheets look
| nice though.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > compared to states that take an active role in their own
| development.
|
| I'm not sure I follow your argument. Which non-European
| states do you think do this well?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Probably the Moon colony around year 2150.
| foxhill wrote:
| i was unable to update my driving licence for the best part of a
| year because of some (still unknown) internal issue.
|
| i hope they have better luck bringing back up a degraded/read-
| only etcd service after a power cut.
|
| unrelated - i guess i have some real contempt for the current
| deployment stack meta :/
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