Two landmark publications: the State of Digital Government Review, and the blueprint for modern digital government are clear - cloud technology is helping to reshape how government works. With the blueprint setting out the long-term vision, and with the Government …
As GOV.UK gets bigger, we often need to revisit the ways that we originally solved some problems. One thing that's changed recently is how we prepare for disaster recovery. Disaster Recovery The reality of working in technology is that software …
Today a minor change to our main site search went live. I hope it is an improvement in the experience of searching the site using a screen reader. The problem Here is the search page on GOV.UK. It has a …
One of the more interesting stories that came out of our work on Individual Electoral Registration (IER) was our adoption of Mustache, a logic-less templating language.
Hello, I’d like to draw your collective attention to two challenges for open standards: exchange of calendar events exchange of contact information The date of the next bank holiday is one of the top needs answered by GOV.UK. I like …
Last month we launched the new online electoral registration service. This is the digital part of the wider Individual Electoral Registration (IER) policy. Pete has already blogged about how we engaged with lawyers while developing the service. In this post …
We recently completed an alpha on identity assurance for organisations. The objective of an alpha is to gain understanding of a service and validate a design approach by building a working prototype. As part of the alpha, we built a …
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 …
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 …
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 …
On Tuesday night, we moved GOV.UK from one set of servers to another - with any luck, nobody noticed. Much of what we do at GDS is designed to be noticed in some way, usually because we are trying to …
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