I've used the GOV.UK PaaS since the private beta. I was a user research subject and gave early feedback. I've used it on multiple projects since.
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.
Agree, I'm not sure how they can say with a straight face that people should use the other new forms services they are launching. If that is not profitable will it just be shut down in a few years too?
PaaS ran on AWS anyway, so it wouldn't be Amazon (I would guess? Unless they think they can charge more/upsell by departments procuring directly from them). Perhaps Google or MS were upset that by PaaS running atop AWS, AWS became the de facto 'official' cloud service for government?
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.