The General Service Administration’s development team at 18F has been hard at work pumping out code and standards to help agencies operate better in the digital realm but at times they’ve found themselves lacking in resources, particularly when it comes to fielding enough subject matter experts for every project.
18F — and many other federal agencies — leverage cloud services to help maximize available resources but that’s not always enough. Last week, the team introduced Cloud.gov, a central portal to give 18F and other development teams access to the expertise needed to move projects forward.
“Even with [infrastructure as a service] in our toolbox, infrastructure experts are needed in order to best manage, configure and secure these IaaS resources,” Bret Mogilefsky, 18F DevOps product lead, wrote in an Oct. 9 blog post.
Along with basic knowledge of how infrastructure relates to development, “The government domain further requires them to have compliance expertise in order to ensure the service being delivered satisfies a byzantine regulatory framework and then generate a mountain of documentation to prove it to other people,” Mogilefsky notes. “The magic happens when an infrastructure team encapsulates their expertise and then exposes that expertise as a service which can be used directly by developers.”
That service is considered platform as a service (PaaS), he explains, and is now available as an open source offering on Cloud.gov.
The new website gives 18F a central access point for infrastructure solutions and advice, freeing them to commit more resources to the actual develop and deployment process.
Mogilefsky compared the new platform to how a shipyard expedites boatbuilding.
“Giving those teams more time to work on their boat and less time worrying about the boat launch allows 18F to keep our teams small, our products robust and our launches frequent,” he wrote.
18F project managers currently using the platform have had good things to say.
“The streamlined ATO process was incredibly helpful in helping the [College Scorecard] project go live on schedule,” Sarah Allen, an 18F developer, said in a testimonial on the Cloud.gov page. “We needed specific services that were not yet available in the platform and the Cloud.gov team responded quickly and supported our needs, letting us focus on the data and the software.”
For the time being, Cloud.gov is only available to 18F developers, however the team is looking to scale the PaaS offering to other agencies in the near future. A pilot is currently underway to test the feasibility and identify any potential issues.
“We plan to see what works, what doesn’t work and fix any process bottlenecks that pop up and then hope to roll the service out more broadly,” Mogilefsky said.
