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Anna ShipmanTechnical ArchitectGovernment Digital Service@annashipman
The Government Digital Service
We are a unit of government within the UK’s Cabinet Office
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We started with GOV.UK
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The best place to find government services and information
We’re not just fixing websites
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We also work with departments to transform digital services
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There are over 800 services
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We need to look at the common problems
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And the most common problem is hosting
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Platform as a Service
I probably don’t need to explain PaaS to you
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Here is the slide we’re using to explain the idea in government
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This detracts from the time teams can spend on their main expertise
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Additional thing for government: procurement is hard
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Our initial thoughts
Self-service
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Self-serviceSo infrastructure team don’t just do admin
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Support model
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Support modelApp developers on-call for their apps
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Support modelApp developers on-call for their appsPlatform team on-call for platform
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Support modelApp developers on-call for their appsPlatform team on-call for platformNo runbooks
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Support modelApp developers on-call for their appsPlatform team on-call for platformNo runbooksBetter experience for the end-user
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Multi-tenancy
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Multi-tenancyGranularity of user permissions
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Multi-tenancyGranularity of user permissionsHandling resource contention
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Multi-tenancyGranularity of user permissionsHandling resource contentionIsolation from other tenants
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Multiple cloud providers
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Multiple cloud providersTo avoid vendor lock-in
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Multiple cloud providersTo avoid vendor lock-inDifficult to add later
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Multiple cloud providersTo avoid vendor lock-inDifficult to add laterDetails of how unclear at this stage
hot/hot? hot/warm?
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What we’ve done
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We decided to use Tsuru for the initial prototype
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Showed it to users in government to get feedback
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Meanwhile building same functionality in Cloud Foundry to compare
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We haven’t worked out which is most suitable for us yet
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That’s not what I want to talk about now
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Though if these are problems that interest you, we are hiring!
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/jobs/@annashipman
What we’ve learned from users
They definitely like the idea of a PaaS
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Self-service is good for both sides
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Multi-tenancy is important
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Support model had buy-in
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But the feedback from users on multiple cloud providers was not what we expected
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None of our users wanted it
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And it’s very hard
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Lowest common denominator
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Google Compute Engine doesn’t have internal load balancers
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Can’t take advantage of cool features of all the providers
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We were conflating resilience with commercial concerns
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Users still have a need to avoid being locked in to one vendor
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We are now looking at other ways to address that
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What we’ve learned about PaaS
I no longer think we just need to sit tight for two years
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Fast growing field but it’s diversifying
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For example, virtualisation vs hardware
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Only some will support multi-tenancy
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And we now know multi-tenancy is important to our users
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GDS@annashipman@annashipman https://www.gov.uk/design-principles
The most important thing...
Make sure you understand what yourusers need
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Thanks!
Anna Shipman@annashipman
