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Comment by hugoromano | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

I would expect to see a 10% procurement discount, since they presumably have more negotiating power with AWS when buying £££££'s worth of stuff annually, rather than every individual government team setting up a small account for a few ££'s.

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 £000's more than the fee!

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