GOV.UK Platform as a Service
Published 28 July 2016
© Crown copyright 2016
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/platform-as-a-service/platform-as-a-service
1. What is GOV.UK Platform as a Service?
GOV.UK Platform as a Service (GOV.UK PaaS) makes it easier and cheaper for teams across government to host applications, services and components.
GOV.UK PaaS provides all the necessary infrastructure you need for hosting services. This means individual teams don’t have to build their own hosting stack.
A core team takes responsibility for managing the underlying infrastructure, for example networking, storage and compute resource.
2. How it works
GOV.UK PaaS approaches hosting applications in 2 ways:
- a GDS managed platform on which service delivery teams can deploy applications
- the team building it is coding in the open
The GDS managed platform offers resilient, multi-tenant environments deployed to a public cloud (currently Amazon Web Services), in line with the Cloud First policy. Delivery teams (tenants) will use an open source, self-service platform (currently Cloud Foundry) to deploy and manage their applications and data at the government’s OFFICIAL classification.
3. The benefits of using GOV.UK PaaS
Because GOV.UK PaaS removes the need for product teams to build and manage the virtual infrastructure on which their applications run, unnecessary repetition is avoided. Product teams need only be responsible for application management - reducing the need for infrastructure and web operations engineers to spend time on solving the same problems. Instead they can provide valuable input into the design and delivery of services.
4. Find out more
There is more information on the GOV.UK PaaS product page, including our roadmap for future development.
You can also read the GOV.UK PaaS technical documentation.
5. Getting started
The GOV.UK PaaS team works with service teams to understand their needs before adding them to the on-boarding pipeline.
We’re working with several government departments and agencies who are already part of our on-boarding pipeline. Contact Jessica O’Leary if you work as part of a government service team and would like to use PaaS to build your service.