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*".<p>[0] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/service-standard-reports/gov-dot-uk-platform-as-a-service-paas-live-assessment" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/service-standard-reports/gov-dot-uk-platf...</a>
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.<p>Procurement in government is painfully slow, and that's one thing that the PaaS excelled at, all departments could get set up immediately.<p>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.<p>My only hope is that they revisit this decision, but it seems likely we'll have to move the services we manage off.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/trade-tariff-moves-to-govuk-paas/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/trade-tariff-moves-to-g...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>It's a damn shame GDS killed it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I love working in government. I love building accessible, robust, and user-centred services.<p>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 £50 a month of taxpayer money for a monolith with a database and a Redis. I had to do none of those on the PaaS.<p>RIP.
I think it has to be intentional, but if not it’s still funny :)<p>> ”Over the same period departments have built better and more expert in-house cloud engineering capability, and are (broadly) <i>clustering</i> around a Kubernetes based architecture.”*
Another Cloud foundry based platform moving on to Kubernetes. Perhaps <a href="https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s</a> can provide a simple migration path..
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.<p>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.
Key paragraph: "<i>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.</i>"
I wish this were spread to other government IT things.<p>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.
i was unable to update my driving licence for the best part of a year because of some (still unknown) internal issue.<p>i hope they have better luck bringing back up a degraded/read-only etcd service after a power cut.<p>unrelated - i guess i have some real contempt for the current deployment stack meta :/
>The big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP and others) have upped their game<p>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).