I was the first user of the GOV.UK PaaS for a production service - GOV.UK Trade Tariff [0]. It's unfortunate that it has come to this, and as others have pointed out, the blog doesn't instil confidence about using other GDS services in the future.
Procurement in government is painfully slow, and that's one thing that the PaaS excelled at, all departments could get set up immediately.
I hope when making their financial assessment, they included the saving that all departments using the PaaS are making not in infrastructure but ops. Each service will increase ops spending; there isn't a comparable managed platform for UK GOV services, so each service will have to increase its devops support costs. I've used Google Cloud Run and AWS Copilot, and both are far from stable enough, in my opinion, for production use.
My only hope is that they revisit this decision, but it seems likely we'll have to move the services we manage off.
Procurement in government is painfully slow, and that's one thing that the PaaS excelled at, all departments could get set up immediately.
I hope when making their financial assessment, they included the saving that all departments using the PaaS are making not in infrastructure but ops. Each service will increase ops spending; there isn't a comparable managed platform for UK GOV services, so each service will have to increase its devops support costs. I've used Google Cloud Run and AWS Copilot, and both are far from stable enough, in my opinion, for production use.
My only hope is that they revisit this decision, but it seems likely we'll have to move the services we manage off.
[0] https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/trade-tariff-moves-to-g...