Comment by Fluorescence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fluorescence | Hacker News Reader

This is their published reason for shutting down their PaaS:

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2022/07/12/why-weve-decided-to-decom...

> GOV.UK PaaS has not seen the rapid and continued growth that we’ve seen with some of our other platform products, and is now at a point where we either invest heavily in some significant technical architecture changes, or we make the difficult decision to sunset the product. We have decided to do the latter

Not terribly convincing. Not seeing "rapid and continued growth"? Feels like the junk words you say as a ceremony for people who sign-off any crime if justified by "growth".

I think I'd need to see transparency on Amazon lobbying and revolving doors with GDS, let's see... oh, look who "advised" them on this move:

https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/amazon...

> GDS retained Amazon UK boss Doug Gurr as an adviser.

Which gets worse...

> Gurr would have a hand in choosing the government chief digital officer

Seems beyond satire that the Head of Amazon UK has a role in picking in the civil servant that makes hosting choices.

You may be missing a point. Their PaaS was already hosted on AWS. [0] “with GOV.UK PaaS this was predominantly the AWS eu-west-2 (London) region, but some tenancies were hosted in the AWS eu-west-1 (Ireland) region”

The lack of “rapid growth” means few gov areas used it. Intended consumers just used AWS and competitors directly. Maybe in part for sovereignty reasons.

The blog post is saying they moved one of their services off their lightly used PaaS.

[0] https://www.cloud.service.gov.uk/migration-guidance/

Perhaps you are missing the point because the problem is not one event but the process. The accusations of conflict of interest predates the PaaS shutdown which is just the final step of grinding out any technology independence.

Back in the day they used Skyscape for IaaS. They used to have a rule against any IaaS contracts longer than a year. They would issue guidance about issues of platform lock-in with third party PaaS, recommend open standards to maximise portability and control costs and brag about migrating their VMs as proof of their independence. A government owned PaaS is in part a cost control strategy.

Today they migrated from their portable solution to Amazon specific lambda functions and database services. The hooks are in, Amazon is at the wheel and can now crank the costs confident that the whale is trapped. Let's check back in a few years and see how the spend has spiralled.

FWIW but if you want an example of the revolving door: Liam Maxwell was the government CTO then CIO then "UK National Technology Adviser"... currently Amazon "Head of Government Transformation". This is the transformation they wanted: tight coupling between Amazon services and the public purse.

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