GOV.UK
Cutting the maintenance strings on Puppet::Syntax
Today we’re handing over the maintenance of our Puppet::Syntax tool to an open source community group.
Open Source
Opening GOV.UK's Puppet repository
Point 8 of the Digital by Default Service Standard that we publish on GOV.UK says that source code for government services should be open and reusable, and our 10th design principle is "Make things open: it makes things better". We …
Looking at open source PaaS technologies
I’ve been working on a prototype of what a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for government might look like, as we wrote about in a previous post.
How we moved vCloud Tools from Coding in the Open to Open Source
At GDS, most of our code is publicly available in our alphagov organisation on GitHub. We call this “Coding in the Open” rather than “Open Source”. As James explained in a previous blog post this is because for most of …
Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gems
When I started working on vCloud Tools, we had most of our functionality in one repository. There wasn’t a clear separation of concerns – the code was tightly coupled – and it also meant that a user who only wanted …
How we used vCloud Tools to provision a new platform
We recently moved GOV.UK to a new and improved platform. We used vCloud Tools, open source software developed in-house at GDS, to create the virtual machines and networks required as well as configure the firewall, NAT rules and load balancers. Why …
Building tools to provision our machines
Over the last few months, I’ve been leading a small team building tools to automate creation and configuration of our servers. Tools to automate provisioning Currently, our production environment is hosted with Skyscape, and we manage it using VMware vCloud …