I'm quite negatively surprised that a government service is moving from their own platform to AWS for such an important service.
EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round
It's just completely insane to me that they would make the gov internet infrastructure completely (geopolitically) dependent on another country AND just literally give all their (citizens') data away AND pay for that "privilege"?!
I mean if the government can't host the government's websites using tech from the government's country, maybe it would be better to just forget about the whole cyberweb thing altogether? Just turn it off?
A lot of people have a very unrealistic picture of what government budgets are like.
my $12/year VPS does better than us-east-1
quality varies
My point is that NOT hosting it yourself (as a government) costs WAY more in the long run. See my points above.
The same goes for companies in Europe who literally host their trade-secrets (designs, sales, the entire company) on US-servers (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc). The US is the home of their competitors. Who cares about infrastructure costs if you're PAYING to give your trade secrets away to your competitor(s)?!
I mean I'm sure Xi or any other president would be happy to govern the UK in exchange for a small fee? Much more cost effective!
I'm sure the Chinese would also be more than happy to build the UK's roads and (government) buildings at a great discount.
You still don't see my point? We're talking essential infrastructure and Geo-politically highly sensitive data.
That blocked use of AWS for a lot of UK departments due to data sovereignty concerns.
I had a person I trust a lot telling me that "if we go with a bare metal provider like GCore we'd have to hire someone", his reason for bringing that up was that the cost difference would be justified by not having to hire someone,.
However a GCore €400,000k/y bill becomes a €6,000,000~ if you were to use a public cloud, even with the scaling up and down when not in use (we are an extreme case of needing a lot of dumb unreliable compute thats geographically distributed).
I can hire a lot of sysadmins for that money, but I probably don't even need one because public clouds also need devops staff to manage the complexity anyway.
Anyway, I am a former sysadmin. I am confident that I can identify competence in the requisite areas.
At a company if a department isn't working out you just restructure and move on, but in the government, that team is going to retire in your org and collect pension from you, and there's very little you can do about that.
Lack of cost control or effective use of a cloud provider leads to spiralling uncontrollable costs.
This is a very good question, and bears repeating.
It's not a massive database as well. 400GB with 1k inserts/second.
For the UK at least, that ship has _long_ since sailed....
Spoken like someone who has never worked in the public sector. Hiring can easily take 6+ months or more due to an ever-increasing list of requirements that government HR is required to fulfill, not least of which is passing a security clearance which takes even more time. The best people on the market rarely have the patience for this. Once your employees do get hired - on-boarding can take another few/several/more months, getting various permissions, technical documentation, etc. Everything is out-of-date because making changes requires committee consensus, in a culture that is risk-averse, because nobody notices when you out-perform (after all, the requirements were also set by a committee that doesn't know who you are) but something going wrong is grounds for termination. Public sector work over-relies on hiring contractors precisely to shift blame for failure to the contractors. Managed database services are excellent tools to shift this kind of catastrophic risk of data loss to a contractor/vendor (who is managing the database).
Governments not owning their data isn't due to technical or budgetary limitations - it's strictly cultural.
Outsourcing the complexity to run and maintain a secure reliable database cluster really is making good use of the managed service model.
Do you think this move didn't take even longer to plan?
> to shift blame
That reason is much more plausible.
All those reasons to go AWS hold for a private company, not for a government service of a first world country and G7 member. AWS has a lot of compliant services, but it's not like they're doing rocket science one of the top 5 richest countries in the world cannot afford to develop or contract within its borders.
The simple reason is that the UK has been on a long trend of selling out to the highest bidder, whether they are US tax avoiding companies, chinese or managed by Russian oligarchs. We have chosen AWS for the same reason Post Office chose Fujitsu.
I had to spend a lot of time writing my privacy policy (perks of being CTO... yay), and part of that privacy policy was an admission that we transfer ownership of data to a US company (by using public cloud) despite using european datacenters.
This is because our agreement is with a US entity.
It already was. Read the article.
Everyone I know working FedRAMP jobs is prior military/g-level.
So, some people don't lie, say they smoked pot in high school and none of them make it to the next step.
I had a twitter convo last year or pre-x whenever with the CTO of some org I can't remember (I don't think centcom, something much smaller) and he mentioned that they've lightened up quite a bit, or at least his program which was a softwar engineering group was more lenient. He was looking for engineers on via twitter on his official account.
So maybe that's loosening up here thankfully.
Well, there is the other way, but, as we know, never ever that would happen.
The "let's be managed and only hire developers" is a huge myth. All large organizations involve tons of "cloud engineers" or "devops" depending on how they want to call them and are just sysadmins with a different name and a bigger paycheck.
Having actual datacenters doesn't add a ton of complexity and datacenters themselves are often managed by people who don't even have an engineer paycheck. The main difference between being on prem vs cloud is you have to plan (how many servers/storage/network equipment you have to buy and replace on the following year) and pay for stuff (like space, racks) more in advance + take into accounts delays in delivery. This is where cloud makes the job much faster for companies but given the slow pace at which gov stuff happen usually I don't think this is a problem for them.
Remember it's not just about being able to find one single engineer - then they become key-person risk. You need multiple engineers to be able to handle the loss of that engineer, either temporarily (vacation) or permanently (suddenly hit by a bus). Then you end up having a team of DBAs. Then you have functional rather than feature teams. Then you need multiple managers to align to get anything done, and have internal politics.
Being able to consume databases as a product has non-trivial value.
I've worked on a number of UK government projects, including some with particularly sensitive security and data requirements.
Having some knowledge of their on-prem data centres and UK Cloud offering they have also used moving to AWS has so many operational, security and resilience benefits that aren't available elsewhere. It's not a free-lunch by any means and needs thought and governance certainly but the procurement simplification benefits alone make going to the public cloud a no brainer for a lot of government services.
It is worth knowing that even the on-prem data centres are usually operated by 3rd parties such as HP, BT and IBM. There was an initiative to have "Crown-managed" data-centers but it's not particularly scalable.
Downtime becomes negligible and global reach vastly increases with comparably little cost.
Honestly you should be frightened when you see someone NOT using a cloud provider, because it is hard work to properly run and secure a datacenter. Even Equinix fucks up HARD regularly and they are considered the gold standard (shout out to those I saw at 350 E Cermak over the weekend).
By golly, the government can't do business if it isn't a datacenter operations company, a software vendor, and a car manufacturer.
I mean, precisely, which is why some countries are rapidly turning into failed states. Too much buck-passing and outsourcing.
On RDS we had inexplicable spikes in cost, deteriorating support and no real support for any of our issues. When we tried using DMS, it just didn't work as expected, even after spending two days on the phone with their support.
'moving to AWS' (or any cloud provider) is not 'hiring experts' it's just outsourcing the risk to an entity that you, in the event of a genuine crisis, have no leverage over beyond 'we're going to stop paying you (once we migrate away from you which will take ten years)'
Boy, am I embarrassed! I need to start building my own datacenter right away, all my shit is on AWS!!!
And I'm not surprised if, they got some kickback, discount etc in some way to promote AWS on their blog. Not claiming its so, but I would not be surprised at all. It reads as one big advertisement.
That changes nothing. It just means this unjustifiable nonsense is going on for a while.