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!<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...</a>
[1] <a href="https://design-system.service.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://design-system.service.gov.uk/</a><p>Edit: Yes, I know the UK Gov's system for benefits isn't easy to understand. That's on the Gov, not GDS :)
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, <a href="https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/</a>) and Pay (lets you take inbound payments quickly, <a href="https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.payments.service.gov.uk/</a>).
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.<p>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.<p>Happy to answer more questions.
"The platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services in the UK"... (see the beginning at <a href="https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/features/</a>)
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.)
See also cloud.gov for the US Federal government.<p><a href="https://cloud.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.gov/</a>
<a href="https://github.com/cloud-gov" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloud-gov</a>
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.
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:<p><a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/working/jobs/" rel="nofollow">https://www.parliament.uk/about/working/jobs/</a>
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:<p>- 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)<p>- HSM/Vault for standard secrets management across applications<p>- Encrypted backup to data lake service, with cold storage option.<p>- vulnerability scanning and patch management (lines of business can't be trusted to do application patching)<p>- CI/CD pipeline service<p>- Jira/ADO or other "standard" project collaboration scheme<p>Managers don't usually know about this stuff, and they're the dealbreakers when you don't have them.
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.
Looks like a decent CloudFoundry implementation, doing what its good at: keeping developer teams abstracted from lower level cloud infrastructure and orchestration internals.
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.<p>There are already a ton of snowflake "single platform for X department" deployments.<p>That said, I applaud the effort and hope it becomes the norm.
We run the Cosmic Bazaar forecasting service (Economist article: <a href="https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/how-spooks-are-turning-to-superforecasting-in-the-cosmic-bazaar" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/04/15/...</a>) on their PaaS and their services and people have been excellent to work with all around. Friendly, professional shop.
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.<p>The developers behind this effort are great, and well, they use Ruby which is my language of choice at the moment.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/alphagov" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alphagov</a>
I wonder how their costs fare against the competition. (sorry, cloud space isn't my forte)
<a href="https://admin.london.cloud.service.gov.uk/calculator" rel="nofollow">https://admin.london.cloud.service.gov.uk/calculator</a>
Is the text rendering really poorly for anyone else? I've not had such issues on the goverment website before.<p>The issue seems to be with Firefox, there's no issue in Edge. I assume Chrome would be fine as well
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.
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.