Cloud-Native Platform Development

Landing zones, networking, identity and policy are designed so that compliance is a property of the platform rather than a review each team passes separately. This is the pattern behind the Government Commercial Cloud, whole-of-government infrastructure spanning three cloud service providers with applications following IM8 standards. Policy written into the landing zone is policy nobody can forget to apply later.

Containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code turn the design into something reproducible, with Terraform and CloudFormation describing the estate rather than documenting it after the fact. Golden paths are built so the easy way to ship is also the compliant way, which is what makes adoption voluntary rather than mandated. Reproducibility is what lets an estate be rebuilt rather than only repaired.

Teams move onto the platform one at a time, each with the deployment pipeline, monitoring and access model already provisioned for them. The Content Website Platform is the long-running example: over 500 government websites on one platform, where standing up a new site is a content task rather than a procurement. Each team that lands makes the next one cheaper, which is the whole economic case.

The platform is versioned, patched and extended as the workloads on it change, with cost monitored per team so consumption stays visible to the people creating it. A platform that stops evolving becomes the legacy that the next modernisation programme has to deal with, usually at several times the cost. Funding the platform after launch is what separates one from a migration project.