1. Anna Shipman
Technical Architect Government Digital

2. The Government Digital Service

3. We are a unit of government within the UK’s Cabinet Office
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4. We started with GOV.UK
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5. The best place to find government services and information
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6. We’re not just fixing websites
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7. We also work with departments to transform digital services
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10. There are over 800 services
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11. We need to look at the common problems
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12. And the most common problem is hosting
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13. Platform as a Service

14. I probably don’t need to explain PaaS to you
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15. Here is the slide we’re using to explain the idea in government
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17. This detracts from the time teams can spend on their main expertise
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19. Additional thing for government: procurement is hard
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20. Our initial thoughts

21. Self-service
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22. Self-service So infrastructure team don’t just do admin
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23. Support model
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24. Support model App developers on-call for their apps
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25. App developers on-call for their apps
Support model
App developers on-call for their apps
Platform team on-call for platform
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26. App developers on-call for their apps
Support model
App developers on-call for their apps
Platform team on-call for platform
No runbooks
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27. App developers on-call for their apps
Support model
App developers on-call for their apps
Platform team on-call for platform
No runbooks
Better experience for the end-user
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28. Multi-tenancy
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29. Multi-tenancy Granularity of user permissions
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30. Granularity of user permissions Handling resource contention
Multi-tenancy
Granularity of user permissions
Handling resource contention
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31. Granularity of user permissions Handling resource contention
Multi-tenancy
Granularity of user permissions
Handling resource contention
Isolation from other tenants
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32. Multiple cloud providers
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33. Multiple cloud providers To avoid vendor lock-in
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34. Multiple cloud providers To avoid vendor lock-in
Difficult to add later
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35. Multiple cloud providers To avoid vendor lock-in
Difficult to add later
Details of how unclear at this stage
hot/hot? hot/warm?
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36. What we’ve done

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42. We decided to use Tsuru for the initial prototype
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43. Showed it to users in government to get feedback
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44. Meanwhile building same functionality in Cloud Foundry to compare
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45. We haven’t worked out which is most suitable for us yet
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47. That’s not what I want to talk about now
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48. Though if these are problems that interest you, we are hiring!
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49. What we’ve learned from users

50. They definitely like the idea of a PaaS
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51. Self-service is good for both sides
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52. Multi-tenancy is important
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53. Support model had buy-in
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54. But the feedback from users on multiple cloud providers was not what we expected
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55. None of our users wanted it
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56. And it’s very hard
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57. Lowest common denominator
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58. Google Compute Engine doesn’t have internal load balancers
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59. Can’t take advantage of cool features of all the providers
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60. We were conflating resilience with commercial concerns
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61. Users still have a need to avoid being locked in to one vendor
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62. We are now looking at other ways to address that
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63. What we’ve learned about PaaS

64. I no longer think we just need to sit tight for two years
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65. Fast growing field but it’s diversifying
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66. For example, virtualisation vs hardware
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67. Only some will support multi-tenancy
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68. And we now know multi-tenancy is important to our users
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69. @annashipman
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70. The most important thing...

71. Make sure you understand what your users need
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72. Thanks! Anna Shipman @annashipman