Hosting a modern justice system

They built the perfect platform, but developers didn't come. Discover how the UK's Ministry of Justice learned to market its internal tools to modernize government services.

#1about 2 minutes

Defining modern for a government justice system

The concept of "modern" in government IT involves managing and improving inherited legacy systems, not just using the latest serverless technology.

#2about 4 minutes

The complex hosting landscape at the Ministry of Justice

The Ministry of Justice manages over 7,000 services across on-premise servers, virtual machines, and Kubernetes clusters, prioritizing stability and security.

#3about 5 minutes

A three-platform strategy for modernizing legacy services

A strategy to modernize legacy systems involves a lofty goal of cloud migration which drives incremental improvements like automation and documentation across three core platforms.

#4about 3 minutes

Balancing centralization and autonomy for service teams

Centralized platform teams provide core tools and infrastructure, allowing individual service teams the autonomy to own and configure their applications effectively.

#5about 3 minutes

Lesson one: Why internal marketing is crucial for platform adoption

Simply building a superior technical platform is not enough; you must proactively market it to product owners and budget holders to secure adoption.

#6about 2 minutes

Lesson two: How a shared platform amplifies improvements

A centralized platform allows a single improvement, like a security patch or feature upgrade, to benefit all hosted services simultaneously, increasing efficiency.

#7about 3 minutes

Lesson three: DevOps is a culture, not a role or a team

True DevOps is a culture of empathy and knowledge sharing between developers and infrastructure engineers, which requires deliberate investment in cross-training.

#8about 1 minute

Resources for learning more and getting involved

The Ministry of Justice operates in the open, with public code on GitHub, strategy blog posts, and open roles for those interested in their work.

#9about 12 minutes

Q&A on DevOps culture, government work, and career advice

The speaker answers audience questions about the scope of DevOps, the empathetic culture towards legacy systems, career advice for women, and how the organization adapts to external changes.