Government: Delivering Critical National Infrastructure through a microservice centre of excellence

Synopsis

Tecknuovo built a container platform to helps a division of a major government department deliver Critical National Infrastructure more quickly, securely, and time-efficiently. The platform lets teams deliver applications 77% faster by using standardised patterns. The patterns are infinitely repeatable, promising exponential value across the division, the department, and wider government.

As part of the engagement Tecknuovo created an application services guardrail, a library of patterns and knowledge management, and transfer to support Zero Dependency. The centre of excellence has helped drive standards, best practice, and tooling for the division.

The challenge

Each time the division had a new requirement, it was creating a team to build a new application and platform to run it through — fully from scratch.

This was time-consuming and happening in parallel instances across the division. Teams were building near-identical solutions, reinventing the wheel to solve similar challenges. This was costing time and resource, and created governance and compliance risks which were difficult to monitor in the sprawling multi-platform environment.

Solving today

A lightweight and flexible solution

Tecknuovo proposed to build a cloud-based container platform (CBCP) that would let tenants (projects and functions within the division) build and deploy their applications through one centralised and standardised platform. We chose a container platform as containers are extremely lightweight, taking up minimal space and booting quickly. Containerised applications are also easier to manage, more flexible, quicker to deliver, and more secure than virtualised applications. The platform gives tenants standardised patterns for building applications, developing test automation frameworks for them, and deploying them.

Delivering efficiently

To save on time and resource, we built the platform from other components already in use at the government department, including its AWS platform, CI/CD (Continuous Integration Continuous Development), secret storage service, and security service. We worked closely with tenants from the outset to incorporate their feedback into the build to make sure it accurately met their requirements, and to save time by making agile, iterative changes.

Building tomorrow

Repeatable architecture and tooling

Standardisation and repeatability are the platform’s core characteristics. It gives tenants a blueprint for building and deploying an application, integrating necessary products from outside of the division into a set of centralised platform services for building applications. This includes infrastructure and tooling configuration, guidelines on implementation, and standards on governance and environments.

As long as it’s containerised, any application can be built and run on the platform. And because it’s a centralised resource, it needs just one team to maintain it and provide tenants with support.

This means the platform can be used across the division, the department, and wider government, promising exponential efficiency gains and savings on taxpayers’ money. We designed the technical documentation and knowledge around the platform to be easily transferrable to the department’s ’s teams. We did this by working closely with guilds, making sure the design aligned with the department’s and teams’ ways of working

Results

Fast delivery, huge cost savings

Building and running these applications through the centralised platform has sped up deployment and slashed costs significantly:

• Teams can deploy applications 77% faster — in 10 weeks down from 10 months.
• Teams can build testing automation frameworks 71% faster — in four weeks down from 14.
• This means the platform is estimated to save £250,000 per onboarded tenant.

Delivering Critical National Infrastructure

Four tenants have successfully onboarded to the platform. They are all pieces of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) that need to run meticulously to monitor and safeguard vital UK interests.

Focus on one CBCP tenant: A new computerised processing system

The challenge

A new computerised processing system is one of the Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) systems within the division’s containerised structure. It lets businesses move goods with fewer barriers.

The system has been operational since 2003. It has gone through multiple iterations to improve operations and comply with new requirements. In previous iterations, this work was taking up months of resource every time. To speed up the process and avoid replicated work, the government division wanted to migrate the system from on-premise to AWS, using the CBCP to deploy and support the application.

The solution

Tecknuovo’s’ central CBCP supported the system’s team as they used the CBCP platform to build and deploy the new system application. The team deployed the new application quickly, easily, and securely, thanks to the pre-approved and standardised tools, processes and guardrails offered by the CBCP.

The results

The CBCP-deployed new iteration of the system is now supporting a live piece of CNI that’s helping the division to seamlessly manage core services.

Running on the CBCP platform will improve future iterations of the system too — in terms of the application’s efficiency and the ease of building and deploying. It will let teams quickly and easily modernise the application, minimise downtime through blue green deployment patterns, and manage cost through improved FinOps practices.