Choosing Cloud Foundry for the UK Government's Platform as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Choosing Cloud Foundry for the UK Government's Platform as a Service

governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk

37 pointshenryaj20 comments

Looks like they're going for the full ecosystem of CF development tools too -- BOSH for deployment, Pivotal Tracker for managing work, Concourse for CI.

[Obligatory disclaimer that I work for Pivotal, the main donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry].

(Disclosure: I worked at Pivotal for a bit, as well as a consultancy supplying services to Her Maj's Government)

Yeah, and that's a good call in my book. Concourse + Bosh makes open source CF manageable. I've heard stories of people trying to deploy OS CF without Bosh, and it ending in a world of pain.

I wish Bosh had a better user experience - in fact, I gave a talk alluding to that at CF Summit Berlin. It's got some great qualities missing in other tools, but I dare say most of the folks reading this will never had heard of it. Declarative, convergent, effectively immutable infrastructure-as-code across all the major IaaS providers.

Great to see UK Government IT modernising. Can't wait for HMRC to catch up!

Great to see UK Government IT modernising. Can't wait for HMRC to catch up!

You haven't seen that many publicly funded technology projects, I take it? GDS are a monopoly, and the govt don't care about using what they're making - they're just going through the motions, spending the money.

So, while this is notable from a technical pov, don't kid yourself that this'll be anything other than a billion pound cash cow for the nepotistic web of government.

How's that nhs digitisation (NPfIT) going? Oh, it isn't?

You haven't seen that many publicly funded technology projects, I take it? I have as it happens. Ex-colleagues happen to be working on some, which is rather entertaining as some of those involved are particular left-leaning!

Government buying policy has moved to replace the massive SI consultancies that were holding the Government to ransom with nine-figure contracts to support (and deliver) legacy systems (think 00's era EJB nonsense). GDS is part of that move to more modern working practices, and I for one welcome it.

Governments need IT systems. I would prefer they were delivered with open source platforms and agile methodologies.

I'm interested to hear your ideas for an alternative.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who believes that governments should try to deliver using open source - the improvement that can be made to society in general from taking this approach is immense, IMO. There are so many areas where doing so will benefit everyone, eventually.

Not as negative as the OP - but I have worked within govt projects - and the engagement between GDS and the civil service has always seemed really poor to me; I 100% share GDS' ideals and standards - but somehow it seems to go more wrong than right. I think it's too easy to blame the civil service - GDS should be able to deal with this.

it's happening, but there's a lot of work to do:

http://www.equalexperts.com/hmrc-digital-platform-as-a-club/

Are they seriously going to use Concourse? That's not mentioned in the article, that I can see.

They are - it's in the GitHub repositories: https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf/tree/master/concourse

I should prolly mention that I was lucky enough to work with one of the Concourse authors, and also think it is awesome. Every other CI server I've used has induced rage!

I was interviewed by one of the Concourse authors when i applied to Pivotal; probably the same one, given that you seem to be in London. I think Concourse is a huge step in the right direction for CI, and we've used it on a few projects, but last time we did, a few months ago, it struck me as not quite ready for prime time yet.

Ha - if it was in 2014, I was probably in the office!

I don't think it's hit version 1.0 yet, which would explain its rough edges. I find it interesting that it shares a lot of philosophies with Bosh.

Alex Suraci was working less than 50M from Dmitry Kalinin when Concourse was born and put to work on the Diego team. So in a way it comes as no surprise.

Both of the founders were Cloud Foundry developers, and so had undergone thorough BOSH indoctrination. You can absolutely see that Concourse comes from the same philosophy as Cloud Foundry itself; it's virtually an answer to the question "what would a PaaS for CI look like"?

Agreed on both points. I find it interesting that the properties of Bosh are clear strengths when present in other systems; if what Bosh does is so intrinsically good, why didn't it take over the world? Because it's a PITA to use.

That's meant more of a musing than a passive-aggressive complaint BTW. As someone that's scaled the "Bosh learning cliff" I'd like to see it used more widely.

How about taking what's good about BOSH and carrying that forward into something better? What could be added to Terraform or PaaSTA or something to make it as good as BOSH?

Terraform's model (local state files) is not something that works well, in my opinion. Since AWS doesn't know that you want some operations done "transactionally" (like with CloudFormation), you can easily end up with a half built env that needs to be cleaned up. PaaSTa is more of a CF competitor, as far as I know, not really at the same abstraction level. I think that it would be a lot easier to clean up the UX/marketing of BOSH than doing the opposite.

Have you looked at bosh.io? It's being actively worked on by our designers and engineers, I bet that feedback would be welcome. If you email me I can put you in touch with them.

I've just bothered to chase pointers to find out who you are, and yes, indeed you were. We overlapped by the best part of a year, i think, but never had much cause to interact.

It's come a long way in the last six months. Pivotal have devoted a team of 3 or 4 pairs to it, so progress is at a fast clip now.

Almost every team in Cloud Foundry has switched to using it and some projects out of Pivotal Labs are tinkering with it too.

I think that once the resources ecosystem grows and it becomes more approachable for beginners, Concourse has massive potential.

Another project free of generics, exceptions and heavy abstractions strikes again. Great to see Vulcand usage.

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