[alerter]

Interesting, though I have no idea why the government is using AWS in the first place. This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns.

We could build a public sector cloud and/or adopt a sensible on-prem approach. This requires funding, coordination and technical leadership, but would save the taxpayer an enormous amount over the long term.

Public sector IT is a disaster in general ofc, but I know there are good engineers working there.

[berkes]

As a startup, my reason for using "cloud" (PaaS) is not to catch spikes, but because of focus. Every hour that I spend running around with HDDs, screwdrivers (or the cloud version thereof - storage, ansible, etc) is an hour that I'm not spending on stuff my customers need.

Why would this be any different for a government?

We don't expect our government to build their own cars, but to buy them from Volkswagen or Renault. Even when the government has a clear need for transport. Why do we then insist they build their own IT infrastructure?

[0dayz]

Because the government is not a corporation and it's obligations are different from the private market.

[berkes]

So should a government (e.g. the police) produce its own cars, rather then buy them? Or set up a factory to make laptops?

I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm trying to understand where the line lies (and whether that line is universal for all governments on all layers in all countries).

[objektif]

Your examples do not make sense on prem existed long before cloud and some shops were perfectly fine with it. If the police were producing perfectly fine cars and then they went for a car share program then I would argue that yes it may be reasonable for them to consider going back to producing cars.

[ris]

> This isn't a startup hacking away trying to find PMF, or dealing with unpredictable marketing-driven traffic spikes. We know we need these services running long term, and can make solid predictions about usage patterns.

If you think government needs and demands are predictable, you don't follow politics (particularly uk politics in the last decade).

And then there are these things like pandemics that completely come out of left field. Being able to scale things on demand over the pandemic was one of the key demonstrators for use of the public commercial cloud by the public sector.

[objektif]

Why do we assume scaling can happen only on cloud? Gov sites are usually very low tech. We are not mining crypto. I would guess even if they outright bought servers and just scrap them later on they would come ahead.

[jamietanna]

The UK government as a whole operates across the big names in the public cloud as well as some on-Prem/colo.

I'd very much recommend watching https://youtube.com/watch?v=mpY1lxkikqM&pp=ygUOUmljaGFyZCB0b... from September about Gov.UK's various iterations and some of the migrations across cloud that they've had to do.

One thing about (at least UK government) is that procurement requirements means that they go to market for quotes around usage every few years. If ie Oracle Cloud was 1/10th the price, it would likely mean they'd win the deal, and so would have to migrate to Oracle for the duration of the contract, and then potentially do the same to another cloud if that was cheaper

[StupidOne]

I'm sure a lot of countries in EU did this. First hand I know, they did this in Croatia as I was one of the developer who had to use it to deploy on it. The worst thing I have ever seen in my life. And I worked on a lot legacy apps written in VB.NET, Web forms, old Sharepoint, Basic and even when the whole app was one big mess of store procedures.

AWS, Azure, GC are at least written with thought about end users (us, developers) while government cloud was architectured, designed and built by the lowest bidder whose first goal was to cut and cut and cut his costs whenever possible.

[rjzzleep]

I don't know about the UK, but AWS has has GovCloud in the US for a long time, and to be honest compared to a lot of infrastructure I have seen there it's a blessing. On the flipside, I've met some really amazing infrastructure and ops people in a German gov healthcare institution running the in-house DC, where the problem was neither the tech, nor the people, but 100% the management and their processes, and their desire to be the bottleneck for every single interaction between infrastructure and engineering teams.

[selfmodruntime]

Disclaimer: I work in the public sector.

If you really think the public sector could build anything closely resembling any cloud, you are dreaming. Imagining that one cloud working for the entire public sector, we are entering delusional territory here.

Public sector projects are insanely expensive, take ages to develop and often flat out fail.

Not only that, we are starved for engineers even now. If we ran such a custom cloud, we would shoot ourselves in the leg by not being able to hire from a pool of experienced engineers.

[alerter]

Oh I totally understand that. Public sector IT is littered with failed projects, massive overspends and lasting functional problems. There are numerous examples from the last few years alone - hundreds of millions spent on broken software. I used to work in public affairs and followed a lot of those projects closely.

I don't think this means "government = bad at tech" though. You sometimes see smaller in-house teams do really good work. The biggest issue seems to be with contracting and procurement policy. For example, on the Police Scotland i6 program they hired a bunch of consultancies to write a tender document, and then hired CGI for the final project. That turned out to be a copy of the Spanish system, which turned into a huge and expensive disaster as the requirements differed.

Feels like government has a similar problem to a lot of legacy non-tech companies. They don't have much technical leadership, don't understand the problem, and decide to hand it off to the lowest bidder. Doesn't help that they are often legally obliged to act this way. But the underlying engineering problems aren't unsolvable, and don't need to become a huge mess every time. (Your point about recruitment is fair though)

[chasd00]

The government likely hired a consulting firm and AWS was part of the solution proposed and bought.

[plugin-baby]

This doesn’t sound like how GDS operates.

[MrBuddyCasino]

If you think the public sector could improve its operational efficiency by building, operating and using their own cloud, I've go a bridge to sell you.