Government services have to be so good that people want to tell their friends about them. These services should be easy to find and simple to use and also be cost effective and SME-friendly.

Open source technologies used in GOV.UK government site has been establishing itself. The data site is a watershed in how government approaches open source Web design, both in terms of what you see online and how it was developed. The diversity of open source components, tools and services used was surprising. They use “at least five different programming languages, three separate database types, and two versions of an operating system.” Government official think it a strength the user should not have to navigate the departmental structure of government before finding the service or content they need. On the web, this implies the adoption of a single internet domain for central government.

“The reason we operate such a diverse ecosystem is that we are focused on solving real problems. Our first task is to understand the problem or need we are solving and then to choose the best tool for the job. If we restrict ourselves to moulding the need to the tools we already have, then we risk not solving the initial problem in the best way possible for the user. By restricting software diversity or enforcing rigid organizational standards on a project, there is a possibility of descending into a cargo cult, where we simply repeat the same patterns and mistakes in everything we make,” outlined official in a blog post.

As a recap, GOV.UK was developed to give its users – the UK public – the information they want in a simple and intuitive way and it replace and integrate its previous sites Directgov and Business Link as the primary location to find government services and information.

The site uses most common requests – such as “What is the minimum salary?” or “how to apply for your first provisional driving license” that government websites receive. It then takes users direct to the information that want through asking them simple questions. The site also uses geo-location technology to pinpoint where the request is being made, to help it provide the right information.

What open source stack are they using?

(Copy of data taken from Government Digital Service)

Frontend:

• HTML/CSS/JS – using HTML5 where appropriate, with a heavy focus on accessibility, and validating where we can
• We use jquery as our primary javascript library
• Video playback with the Nomensa Accessible Media Player
• Backend admin systems make use of Twitter Bootstrap
• We use SCSS, as seen in our frontend toolkit
• We’ve worked with A2-Type for font production.

The core of the servers:

• We’re making use of Infrastructure As A Service from Skyscape
• We use Akamai as our Content Delivery Network
• Our servers are running Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04, we’re hoping to upgrade to 12.04 soon.
• Servers are managed with Puppet, using PuppetDB
• Web serving is handled by nginx, proxying to unicorn for our ruby applications. We’re also using gunicorn to run some supporting services. One of the team wrote Unicorn Herder to make Unicorn play nicely with upstart.
• We load balance internally with haproxy and cache requests using Varnish

Redirection:

• nginx deserves an extra mention as it’s letting us do all our redirection
• we’re using perl to manage and test our redirections
• there’s some php to add useful links to the “gone” pages where DirectGov and Businesslink content has been retired
• node.js was used to build a side-by-side browser for reviewing the redirections

Applications:

• The majority of our applications are written in ruby, based on either Ruby on Rails or Sinatra.
• A few components are written in Scala and built on top of Play 2.0
• We’re running Mapit from MySociety which is built on top of Django

Databases and other storage:

• We use MongoDB for most systems, with a few apps also making use of MySQL. PostgreSQL is used by Mapit and Puppet.
• Most search on the site is powered by Elasticsearch, though solr is currently the backend for the need-o-tron.
• A few event-driven systems use RabbitMQ

Monitoring, managing and alerting:

• We gather metrics from our apps with statsd
• We collect logs with logstash
• We monitor systems with ganglia
• Graphite helps us make many, many graphs to understand what’s going on
• Nagios tells us if we need to act on any of that data

Supporting Tools:

• All our code is tested by Jenkins, which we also use to deploy it to servers
• We track usage of the site with Google Analytics, using their API heavily to build dashboards
• We occasionally use New Relic RPM for performance reviews
• DNS is hosted by ja.net / Dyn
• Email (internal alerts) sending via Amazon SES
• Font handling and preparation with FontForge and FontTools
• We keep on track and in touch using Google Apps, Pivotal Tracker and Campfire
• Github helps us manage and discuss our code
• Zendesk keeps the feedback flowing
• We use jekyll & heroku for some of our prototyping
• We’ve built all sorts of internal dashboards. They’re very much our playground and you can find them written in a mixture of Ruby, Clojure, Node.JS, and PHP

DevOps ANGLE

In the specific Open Source section, UK government explained that they should consider open source for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages.

Nobody makes packaged software for digital public services. With the open software, government has the preference for open source, because it means other countries can use it too and help make that software better. This approach will also ensure government are not locked in to some mad oligopoly outsource.

The GOV.UK project, developed by the Government Digital Service, aspires to break this tradition. GOV.UK will become an example of how to provide a user-friendly and cost-efficient hub of information about public services which can be adopted by other governments. The Australian government’s technology and procurement division has also proposed a draft roadmap for moving the data.gov.au website to the open source CKAN platform.