
Choosing Cloud Foundry for the UK Government's Platform as a Service - henryaj
https://governmentasaplatform.blog.gov.uk/2015/12/17/choosing-cloudfoundry/
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jacques_chester
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].

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EngineerBetter
(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!

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madaxe_again
_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?

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EngineerBetter
_You haven 't seen that many publicly funded technology projects, I take it?_
I have as it happens. Ex-colleagues happen to be working on some, which is
rather entertaining as some of those involved are particular left-leaning!

Government buying policy has moved to replace the massive SI consultancies
that were holding the Government to ransom with nine-figure contracts to
support (and deliver) legacy systems (think 00's era EJB nonsense). GDS is
part of that move to more modern working practices, and I for one welcome it.

Governments need IT systems. I would prefer they were delivered with open
source platforms and agile methodologies.

I'm interested to hear your ideas for an alternative.

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djaychela
Glad to see I'm not the only one who believes that governments should try to
deliver using open source - the improvement that can be made to society in
general from taking this approach is immense, IMO. There are so many areas
where doing so will benefit everyone, eventually.

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

