AWS has a lot of pre-audited compliance built into their services. Being able to inherit their certification for services can save an organization a lot of time and effort.
Its not an organisation, its a blucking government, it handles citizen data, and its sending them to a company of foreign country, because it can’t hire some system administrators? A GOVERNMENT? What are they doing? Still looking for their product market fit and can’t afford the headcount? Is it a joke?
EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round
How would you feel if the US government ran on servers from a European company, which also works very hard to avoid paying taxes in US soil?
All those reasons to go AWS hold for a private company, not for a government service of a first world country and G7 member. AWS has a lot of compliant services, but it's not like they're doing rocket science one of the top 5 richest countries in the world cannot afford to develop or contract within its borders.
The simple reason is that the UK has been on a long trend of selling out to the highest bidder, whether they are US tax avoiding companies, chinese or managed by Russian oligarchs. We have chosen AWS for the same reason Post Office chose Fujitsu.
> This is an AWS RDS PostgreSQL database and it lives in the PaaS’ AWS account. Our apps that run in the PaaS talk to this database. We are going to call this database our ‘source database’.
I don't know what it's like in UK but it may be the case that government has a hard time a{ttract,fford}ing talent to administer everything in house. Not that AWS is great for cost saving but if its between paying 50k/year for cloud services and not being able to find an engineer who will competently do the job for less than 50k, then the cloud is your only move really.
They require various clearances (digging into your life and past relationships to a miserable degree), don't allow someone to have ever smoked pot and pay half or less of what you can make in the pvt sector here (usa).
Everyone I know working FedRAMP jobs is prior military/g-level.
Once your past the emerging startup status, running on the cloud involve as much engineers and complexity as running on prem if you want to follow best practices.
The "let's be managed and only hire developers" is a huge myth. All large organizations involve tons of "cloud engineers" or "devops" depending on how they want to call them and are just sysadmins with a different name and a bigger paycheck.
Having actual datacenters doesn't add a ton of complexity and datacenters themselves are often managed by people who don't even have an engineer paycheck. The main difference between being on prem vs cloud is you have to plan (how many servers/storage/network equipment you have to buy and replace on the following year) and pay for stuff (like space, racks) more in advance + take into accounts delays in delivery. This is where cloud makes the job much faster for companies but given the slow pace at which gov stuff happen usually I don't think this is a problem for them.
Remember it's not just about being able to find one single engineer - then they become key-person risk. You need multiple engineers to be able to handle the loss of that engineer, either temporarily (vacation) or permanently (suddenly hit by a bus). Then you end up having a team of DBAs. Then you have functional rather than feature teams. Then you need multiple managers to align to get anything done, and have internal politics.
Being able to consume databases as a product has non-trivial value.
As somebody who worked for the European Commission, and a european national government, I agree with your sentiment, but the harsh reality is that government divisions in generally work on a shoe string budget, when it comes to decisions like these. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a “best effort given the circumstances” move.
I've worked on a number of UK government projects, including some with particularly sensitive security and data requirements.
Having some knowledge of their on-prem data centres and UK Cloud offering they have also used moving to AWS has so many operational, security and resilience benefits that aren't available elsewhere. It's not a free-lunch by any means and needs thought and governance certainly but the procurement simplification benefits alone make going to the public cloud a no brainer for a lot of government services.
It is worth knowing that even the on-prem data centres are usually operated by 3rd parties such as HP, BT and IBM. There was an initiative to have "Crown-managed" data-centers but it's not particularly scalable.
If you saw how non-tech companies run datacenters, well let's just say they're not exactly working with NATO like the big 3 cloud providers do when designing their DCs and backbone.
Honestly you should be frightened when you see someone NOT using a cloud provider, because it is hard work to properly run and secure a datacenter. Even Equinix fucks up HARD regularly and they are considered the gold standard (shout out to those I saw at 350 E Cermak over the weekend).
Yes. RDS is a very reasonable choice if you are a tech company, let alone a govt org. The alternative isn’t “let’s host this ourselves” it is “let’s host this with Oracle at a much higher cost”.
'moving to AWS' (or any cloud provider) is not 'hiring experts' it's just outsourcing the risk to an entity that you, in the event of a genuine crisis, have no leverage over beyond 'we're going to stop paying you (once we migrate away from you which will take ten years)'
"The PaaS team offered us the ability to migrate databases using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)."
And I'm not surprised if, they got some kickback, discount etc in some way to promote AWS on their blog. Not claiming its so, but I would not be surprised at all. It reads as one big advertisement.
It incentivizes public-private cooperation: If the government cracks down on Amazon, Amazon turns off the government's AWS accounts and deletes the data. The government finds that subpoenaing a wiped hard drive is utterly nugatory, and thereby learns humility.
There's an absolute ton of stuff on AWS. There used to be gCloud that allowed for smaller clouds to tender for government contracts bit there was a big pull to AWS, at least from my experience with it.
conception|2 years ago
lnxg33k1|2 years ago
EDIT If they are looking for money id like to participate a bit in the seed round
sph|2 years ago
All those reasons to go AWS hold for a private company, not for a government service of a first world country and G7 member. AWS has a lot of compliant services, but it's not like they're doing rocket science one of the top 5 richest countries in the world cannot afford to develop or contract within its borders.
The simple reason is that the UK has been on a long trend of selling out to the highest bidder, whether they are US tax avoiding companies, chinese or managed by Russian oligarchs. We have chosen AWS for the same reason Post Office chose Fujitsu.
kingkongjaffa|2 years ago
It already was. Read the article.
jazzyjackson|2 years ago
swozey|2 years ago
Everyone I know working FedRAMP jobs is prior military/g-level.
prmoustache|2 years ago
The "let's be managed and only hire developers" is a huge myth. All large organizations involve tons of "cloud engineers" or "devops" depending on how they want to call them and are just sysadmins with a different name and a bigger paycheck.
Having actual datacenters doesn't add a ton of complexity and datacenters themselves are often managed by people who don't even have an engineer paycheck. The main difference between being on prem vs cloud is you have to plan (how many servers/storage/network equipment you have to buy and replace on the following year) and pay for stuff (like space, racks) more in advance + take into accounts delays in delivery. This is where cloud makes the job much faster for companies but given the slow pace at which gov stuff happen usually I don't think this is a problem for them.
solatic|2 years ago
Remember it's not just about being able to find one single engineer - then they become key-person risk. You need multiple engineers to be able to handle the loss of that engineer, either temporarily (vacation) or permanently (suddenly hit by a bus). Then you end up having a team of DBAs. Then you have functional rather than feature teams. Then you need multiple managers to align to get anything done, and have internal politics.
Being able to consume databases as a product has non-trivial value.
justsomehnguy|2 years ago
Well, there is the other way, but, as we know, never ever that would happen.
pmcp|2 years ago
NomDePlum|2 years ago
I've worked on a number of UK government projects, including some with particularly sensitive security and data requirements.
Having some knowledge of their on-prem data centres and UK Cloud offering they have also used moving to AWS has so many operational, security and resilience benefits that aren't available elsewhere. It's not a free-lunch by any means and needs thought and governance certainly but the procurement simplification benefits alone make going to the public cloud a no brainer for a lot of government services.
It is worth knowing that even the on-prem data centres are usually operated by 3rd parties such as HP, BT and IBM. There was an initiative to have "Crown-managed" data-centers but it's not particularly scalable.
otteromkram|2 years ago
Downtime becomes negligible and global reach vastly increases with comparably little cost.
ris|2 years ago
overstay8930|2 years ago
Honestly you should be frightened when you see someone NOT using a cloud provider, because it is hard work to properly run and secure a datacenter. Even Equinix fucks up HARD regularly and they are considered the gold standard (shout out to those I saw at 350 E Cermak over the weekend).
0xbadcafebee|2 years ago
dtnewman|2 years ago
15457345234|2 years ago
'moving to AWS' (or any cloud provider) is not 'hiring experts' it's just outsourcing the risk to an entity that you, in the event of a genuine crisis, have no leverage over beyond 'we're going to stop paying you (once we migrate away from you which will take ten years)'
okasaki|2 years ago
mobilemidget|2 years ago
And I'm not surprised if, they got some kickback, discount etc in some way to promote AWS on their blog. Not claiming its so, but I would not be surprised at all. It reads as one big advertisement.
ivix|2 years ago
msla|2 years ago
_joel|2 years ago
pixelesque|2 years ago
foofie|2 years ago
That changes nothing. It just means this unjustifiable nonsense is going on for a while.
cpursley|2 years ago
cameronh90|2 years ago