Department digital team emphasises open source in moving more infrastructure to cloud
HM Revenue & Customs has booted up its effort to move infrastructure to the cloud with the launch of its Cloud Broker Ecosystem project.
It has been outlined as the next big step in its increasing use of cloud platforms in a digital team blogpost on the foundations of its digital services.
The aim is to move a large part of HMRC’s infrastructure to the cloud, with an “ecosystem” of products to provide and manage the infrastructure. There is an emphasis on automating the process through storing repeatable patterns for infrastructure in code and making them available for re-use.
There is also an emphasis on using open source tools and making those developed by the team available to the open source community.
The blog says this will change the approach for building and running HMRC services that do not fit the platform as a service model.
Work has already been done on identifying the open source tools and configuring various elements such as web and application servers for automated deployment. The beta phase will involve working with teams that maintain core tax systems to identify how they can be moved to the cloud.
This follows the development of the Tax Platform, HMRC’s internal platform as a service, which has been done with a number of open source tools.
“The Tax Platform is designed to make building, testing, deploying and running microservice based web applications very easy,” the blog says.
