The Department for Transport (DfT) has moved its first in-house application to the Google Cloud Platform as part of a wider migration process.
It has shifted its version of the LENNON application (Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Overnight), which is used in the railway industry, to Google Cloud as a first step in a six-month transformation process.
The move has been outlined in a blogpost by Luke Radford, head of CIO Advisory at the DfT, who says it comes after a discovery exercise with Google and as part of a move to shut down the department’s data centres.
The digital team has been working with the DfT’s rail technical and data management team, Google and its partner Cloud Technology Solutions on migrating the LENNON system.
While the project is still in progress, the blog says that processing speeds have been dramatically reduced with the time taken to execute a query cut from hours to less than 20 seconds. It is also making it possible to run multiple queries simultaneously.
The 100Tb plus in-house version of LENNON was heavily used within the DfT and was not being exploited to its full potential because of the slow query times.
Radford says the cloud version is expected to free up a lot of time, improve security, and provide for frictionless back-ups and maintenance.
The team has also begun to use the design pattern developed for the migration for other projects that are in their early stages.
“For DfT’s Digital Service, this project has demonstrated some huge benefits of using Google Cloud Platform,” the blog says. “I hope and expect that this experience will enable us to further improve our efficiency through the transformation of similar applications.”
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