Delivering clearer, simpler, faster public services with Cloud Foundry

Nobody interacts with government because they want to - they interact with government because they have to, and most people come away from online interactions feeling more confused than when they started.

That's why the Digital Transformation Office was created in 2015 – to change the way Australian governments deliver services, by relentlessly focusing all delivery activities on user needs, and modernising technical delivery methods.

Cloud Foundry is at the core of this technical modernisation, with the DTO providing a Cloud Foundry-based delivery platform to government for building new services. Every team gets a CD pipeline, centralised monitoring and logging, and an app runtime – driving a culture change through tools.

In this talk we'll learn about the problems with the traditional approach to digital service delivery in government, what opportunities Cloud Foundry creates for architecting the delivery of user-focused services, and how Cloud Foundry enables the DTO to help government deliver simpler, clearer, faster public services.

Transcript

1. Delivering clearer, simpler, faster government services with Cloud Foundry Lindsay Holmwood @auxesis Head of Development, DTO @AusDTO
2. The problem
3. 1509* * public federal government websites we know about
4. People have no “mental model” of what government wants them to do.
5. “I just wing it to be honest. As I need it, I research it. Which is probably not ideal. I need the big picture. I need to talk the big picture and then how to help kids navigate particular areas.” School counsellor
6. People design their businesses to minimise government bureaucracy.
7. “I was talking to the guys in Japan in September saying I’d be able to start (selling their label) by December [laughs]. This whole thing has been a case of scaling back my expectations.” Clothes store owner
8. People pay other to deal with government for them.
9. “If you can afford it, pay an expert to deal with the government. It’ll bury you and distract you from your own business” Retired businessman
10. People with experience still have trouble.
11. “My biggest frustration is being on hold with the immigration department. I need to speak to them at least once a week. Last Friday I was on hold for 1 hr 20 minutes. My longest wait has been 2 hrs 30 minutes.” Internal immigration agent
13. The challenge
14. Do the hard work to make it simple for users
15. Understand the who, what when, where of user interactions with government
16. Design & Technology
17. Clearer, simpler, faster public services
18. Digital Transformation Office
19. How do we work?
20. Focus on meeting user needs
21. Cross-functional teams
22. Dev & Ops & Security & Design & UX & Content & Management
23. The unit of delivery is the team
24. Everyone is responsible for delivery
25. Service delivery teams OWN THEIR AVAILABILITY
26. Validate early & often Discovery ↲ Alpha ↲ Beta ↲ Live ↲
27. Journey mapping
28. Minimal wireframes
29. Prototypes
30. Build the thing
31. Innovate on service delivery NOT TECHNOLOGY
32. Standardise technology
33. Build capability across government
34. Onboard people faster
35. Contribute back to Open Source
36. Make the right things easy
37. Cloud Foundry helps us do this
39. What does delivery look like?
40. 30 60 90 120 2015-10-29 2015-11-08 2015-11-16 2015-11-25 GOV.AU deploys over time
48. AusDTO/gov-au-alpha
49. Releases are a non-event
50. Process scaled as we added contributors
51. Contributions are democratised
52. 15 contributors Dev & Ops & Design & UX & Content & Management
53. The unit of delivery is the team
55. What do teams need?
56. a way to get their code running in front of users
57. insight into how that code is working (or failing)
58. data to test hypotheses about user and system behaviour
59. Safety & Confidence
61. Service
62. Service App App App
63. Service App App App Platform
64. Service App App App Platform Service App App App
65. Service App App App Platform Service App App App Platform
66. Service delivery teams OWN THEIR AVAILABILITY
67. And the DTO provides a platform to deliver on
68. “cloud.gov.au”
69. Run, change, and measure the applications that make up a service
70. 1. Make deployment simple, fast, and painless
71. 2. Help teams make the journey to go- live
72. 3. Help teams build fast, secure, and reliable services
73. Make the right things easy
74. From alpha to beta to live
75. What is it?
76. • App hosting platform • Continuous Deployment service • Simple logging service • Simple monitoring service
77. clear integration points for building, testing, deploying, logging, measuring, and monitoring
78. Cloud Foundry
79. Zero downtime deploys
80. 18F/aws-broker
81. Jenkins & CircleCI
83. clear integration points for building, testing, deploying, logging, measuring, and monitoring
84. bin/cibuild.sh bin/cideploy.sh
85. #!/bin/bash # Download the cf cli wget ‘https://release/cf.tar.gz' -O cf.tar.gz tar zxvf cf.tar.gz -C bin export PATH=$PATH:$(pwd)/bin # Login to cf (these environment variables must be exported by CI) cf login -a $CF_API -u $CF_USERNAME -p $CF_PASSWORD -o $CF_ORG -s $CF_SPACE # Deploy the app cf push <app>
86. graylog
87. Service App App App Platform
88. Service App App App Platform Traceability
89. PaaS is important
90. But PaaS is bigger than an app runtime
91. Make the right things easy
92. Technology is cheap, people are dear
93. PaaS eliminates classes of problems
94. How do I make the application available?
95. How do I recover from an outage?
97. Time to detection: 4 minutes
98. Time to recovery: 12 minutes
99. Human intervention: 0
100. PaaS frees up your teams to focus on the bigger picture
101. Free people up to help org learn
102. Deliver clearer, simpler, faster public services
103. Thank you!
104. Thank you! ❤ the talk? Let @auxesis & @AusDTO know!