Choosing Cloud Foundry for the UK Government's Platform as a Service

https://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/17/choosing-cloudfoundry/

by henryaj • 11 years ago

37 20 11 years ago

governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk

Looks like they're going for the full ecosystem of CF development tools too -- BOSH for deployment, Pivotal Tracker for managing work, Concourse for CI.

[Obligatory disclaimer that I work for Pivotal, the main donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry].

EngineerBetter5• 11 years ago

(Disclosure: I worked at Pivotal for a bit, as well as a consultancy supplying services to Her Maj's Government)

Yeah, and that's a good call in my book. Concourse + Bosh makes open source CF manageable. I've heard stories of people trying to deploy OS CF without Bosh, and it ending in a world of pain.

I wish Bosh had a better user experience - in fact, I gave a talk alluding to that at CF Summit Berlin. It's got some great qualities missing in other tools, but I dare say most of the folks reading this will never had heard of it. Declarative, convergent, effectively immutable infrastructure-as-code across all the major IaaS providers.

Great to see UK Government IT modernising. Can't wait for HMRC to catch up!

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

Great to see UK Government IT modernising. Can't wait for HMRC to catch up!

You haven't seen that many publicly funded technology projects, I take it? GDS are a monopoly, and the govt don't care about using what they're making - they're just going through the motions, spending the money.

So, while this is notable from a technical pov, don't kid yourself that this'll be anything other than a billion pound cash cow for the nepotistic web of government.

How's that nhs digitisation (NPfIT) going? Oh, it isn't?

twic5• 11 years ago

Are they seriously going to use Concourse? That's not mentioned in the article, that I can see.

EngineerBetter5• 11 years ago

They are - it's in the GitHub repositories: https://github.com/alphagov/paas-cf/tree/master/concourse

I should prolly mention that I was lucky enough to work with one of the Concourse authors, and also think it is awesome. Every other CI server I've used has induced rage!

jksmith• 11 years ago

Another project free of generics, exceptions and heavy abstractions strikes again. Great to see Vulcand usage.

Choosing Cloud Foundry for the UK Government's Platform as a Service

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