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Service Overview for BC Government Private Cloud as a Service/Openshift 4 Platform |
This resource is a Service Overview for the BC Government's Private Cloud as a Service also knows as DevOps Openshift 4 Platform and concisely describes in a plain language the key elements of the service for current and prospective users of the service. |
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We help ministries deliver digital services to citizens with ease and speed^1 on our secure^2 on-premise hosting platform for cloud-native applications.
- OpenShift Container Platform Hosting
- Silver tier of the Private Cloud Platform offers application and data hosting for cloud-native apps in the Kamloops Data Centre and is suitable for most government services (up to and including Protected B data classification)
- Gold Tier offers an option to configure applications to take advantage of a new disaster recovery environment in Calgary Data Center (geographic failover) and comes with longer testing windows for Platform software and hardware updates
- Shared automation, security, monitoring and communications tools installed onto the Platform
We host B.C. government projects that meet the following criteria:
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Have Executive Sponsorship Your executive understands what is required to support continuous service improvement and is committed to resourcing your project so that it can be continuously maintained and improved even after it's been built.
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Are Open Source Your project is based on open source code, with custom code hosted in one of the BCGov GitHub organization repositories.
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Have a Dedicated Agile Teams Your project will be supported by a fully funded team that follows an agile methodology, with explicit roles such as DevOps specialist, Scrum Master and Product Owner — ideally with one or more of these roles filled by dedicated staff. Note: we require that the role of the Product Owner be filled in by a permanent government employee.
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Collaboration Your team is committed to participate in and contribute to the B.C. government's open development community.
Read more about the services and products that we provide as well as about how to get access to them in this Private Cloud Service Definition.
Private Cloud Platform Services Team provides ongoing training, virtual events and developer documentation for the OpenShift Platform, and the shared tools installed on the Platform.
Private Cloud Platform Operations Team at Advanced Solutions ESIT provides 24/7 technical support for the Platform including software and hardware maintenance.
We’re stewards of a community of users who frequently collaborate with us and each other to solve common problems. While we don’t provide application development support, the strong community of Platform users helps each other solve app-level questions.
We’re continuously improving our service offering to keep up with the needs of our digital teams:
Coming in 2022: New Hosting Tier for the services that span the private cloud and traditional infrastructure
Offers a secure connectivity between containers running in the Private Cloud Platform and virtual machines and physical servers in other zones of the Data Centre, and eventually with workloads in the public cloud.
We could tell you what we think our value is, but you’re probably more interested in what the product owners and developers who use our platform say. Here’s how they describe the key benefits of our service:
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High velocity enables rapid delivery of digital apps
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Secure and trusted
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Modern and innovative tech stack
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Creates efficiencies across government through reusable standards and code
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Collaborative and community oriented
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Empower teams by giving them control over how they build their app
Our service is available to any digital service team in BC government. The teams most likely to be successful are product teams with DevOps capabilities. Developers, DevOps specialists, and tech leads are the primary users of our Platform.
As members of digital service teams, Product Owners are also a valued and important user group of our service, as they are heavily involved in digital service delivery decision-making and accountable for the value delivered by the applications on the Platform.
We prioritize strong, personal relationships with our users and function as a “team of teams”: a network of many smaller teams from multiple business areas who come together to achieve common goals. Our users see us as their collaborators, advocates and co-pilots in their mission to deliver efficient, high-quality digital services to citizens.
To foster a community of openness and collaboration, we engage over multiple communication channels, such as:
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Documentation and knowledge sharing platforms (DevHub at https://developer.gov.bc.ca, GitHub at http://www.github.com)
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Online collaboration tools (MS Teams, Rocket.Chat)
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Virtual events (e.g., Platform Community Meetups meetings, Live Help Sessions and developer workshops)
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Email mailing lists for Platfomr updates(sign up with the Platform Services Comms Subscription Service)
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One-on-one communications (personalized support with how to effectively leverage OpenShift Platform for the teams that need it)
While our closest partners are the developer community and members of our team of teams, we also work closely with the DevExchange Lab and Enterprise Hosting Services to deliver our services.
We have a number of stakeholders who have input and interest in our service, including: Executive sponsors, ministry and sector MCIOs, MISOs, Digital Investment Office (DIO), Ministry ISB/IMBs, Enterprise Architecture and the OCIO Information Security Branch (including Security Operations Centre).
External contractors also help us with our mission, notably Advanced Solutions ESIT (through the agreement with the OCIO Enterprise Hosting Services ranch), Arctiq (our delivery partner for Platform improvements), RedHat (our trusted partner that provides enterprise support for the OpenShift software), and the vendors that provide our shared automation, security, monitoring and communications tools.
Our work can be divided into three main categories:
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Platform administration: Approving and setting up namespaces for users on the Platform, running the Platform Project Registry, development and maintenance of the OpenShift 4 Platform, building and maintaining Platform’s shared tools (Vault Secret Management Service, Aqua Container Scanning Service, Artifactory, Sysdig App Monitoring Service, EnterpriseDB HA Service for PostgreSQL databases, Rocket.Chat)
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Platform leadership: Customer relationship management, stakeholder engagement, cost management
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Education + outreach: Documentation, building, maintaining and contributing to a community, knowledge sharing / working in the open, OpenShift training
Skilled people, modern technology and our vendor partners help us do this work, and we also rely on significant executive buy-in in the form of support, advocacy, trust and willingness to allow us to take managed risks.
The Private Cloud Platform as a Service was previously entirely funded through OCIO capital funding as part of a multi-year pathfinder project. The 2021/2022 fiscal year is the last year of this funding approach, containing a hybrid of remaining project capital and newly supported operational OCIO funding endorsed by Treasury Board and the Digitial Investment Office. The 2022/2023 fiscal year is fully funded through OCIO operational funding endorsed by both Treasury Board and the Digital Investment Office, forecasted and inclusive of maintaining and building upon deliverables completed in the Private Cloud Platform as a Service Roadmap from the 2021/2022 fiscal year. There will be no cost recovery in the 2022/2023 fiscal year.
Based on requests from ministries, the IM/IT funding model for all OCIO shared services continues to be reviewed to make sure that it aligns with client needs and supports sustainable service delivery. As part of this review, we will continue to explore funding model questions with our team and our partners.
Our partners have told us that, under any funding model created, some aspects of the service should continue to be supported by central funding and subsidization, including: hosting applications under a certain resource usage threshold, training and documentation, community support, and support for our service’s shared tools.
Moving forwards, we've been asked by our partners that the cost and funding model of this service to be transparent, simple and easy.
The OCIO as a whole, inclusive of the the Platform Services Team, will continue working with our partners to develop funding model options. Any cost recovery of a new funding model, as of the 2021/2022 fiscal year, would not be in place until the 2023/2024 fiscal year.
##Links:
1: Most Platform projects average 7 days or less of development effort to launch the first iteration of the new service (according to the survey in summer 2020)
2: The OpenShift 4 Platform and all its services have STRA completed and signed-off by the government’s Chief Security Office