Why we’ve decided to decommission Gov.uk PaaS
gds.blog.gov.uk
gds.blog.gov.uk
[0] https://www.gov.uk/service-standard-reports/gov-dot-uk-platf...
I'm not sure I follow your argument. Which non-European states do you think do this well?
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.
The entire point of a public service is that benefits accrue to people other than the direct consumers of the service.
Just looking at money is incredibly short sighted and naïve
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...
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 £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.
RIP.
> ”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.”*
This is the one I expect to become the primary CF product on k8s
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.
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.
Most services are not using PaaS, but are deployed onto AWS or Azure and integrate with other services (notably Notify) via APIs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
Is it just me or is it weird to see "startup speak" from gov agencies?
> 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
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.
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).
It's OJ, but thanks for giving me the perfect stage name for my 90s-pop-culture-themed hip-hop act.