Also, join the Open Standards Consultation led by Cabinet Office to participate in shaping the future public sector IT procurement. The consultation closes on the 1 of May.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had to re-research this so this is the last time as I’m going to document it!

I really like jQuery UI modal dialogs but I always have trouble getting them to do the proper thing when they’ve closed! Poor Alex is forever reminding me after I’ve spent 20 fruitless minutes looking so I’ll save his sanity by noting that you can pass data to some (maybe all) UI elements.

The use case was simply that some cells within a table had to be populated with user content, it needn’t be saved to the server or anything, just needed to be displayed.

It’s basically done like this:

$('.editableContent').on("click", function(event) {
    $("#dialog-form").find("textarea").val($(this).text());
    $("#dialog-form").data('bob', $(this)).dialog("open");
});

Here we’re adding the existing content to the textarea in the first line of the function and then adding the calling object to the data of the dialog and calling it bob (hey, it’s short enough ehh?)

Then, in the dialog code:

$("#dialog-form").dialog({
    autoOpen: false,
    height: 300,
    width: 350,
    modal: true,
    buttons: {
        "Add Content": function() {
            $(this).data('bob').text($(this).find("textarea").val());
            $(this).dialog("close");
        },
        Cancel: function() {
            $(this).dialog("close");
        }
    },
    close: function() {
    }
});

The important bit here is the line:

$(this).data('bob').text($(this).find("textarea").val());

Which calls the bob bit of the data object (giving us a reference to the original td) and populating it with the content of the text area. Bloody brilliant, now I shouldn’t forget it!

Caching was the obvious solution: instead of the server sending queries off to our RDBMS we could cache previous calls and return them instead – saving time on the travel of the query, the crunching of the query and the return of the result. There’s a lovely video illustrating this process where Amazon introduces it’s ElastiCache service. I got the chance to play with the Amazon service yesterday afternoon and it’s brilliant.

We use base machine images running a LAMP stack and had to install Memcached seperately in order to make use of it. That’s not so much of an issue though TBH and once it’s up and running it’s a dream to manage in that there’s no options: once it’s up and running you can’t do anything other than empty it if you need to. I guess it can be quite memory intensive as it’s running in RAM (and virtual RAM in our case), but we’ve not noticed as yet so I guess it’s all fine and dandy.

Naking use of Memcached is simplicity itself as well: I make a query, usually via JavaScript, and send off to the server for the result. The server creates a name using the query parameters and checks to see if that name exists as a key in its internal key-value store, if it does then it returns the value, if it doesn’t then the query is made to the server and the result cached as the value under the original key. The first query always takes a smidgen longer but subsequent requests are as fast as lightening. For some of the intensive queries we are making its a difference between a low number of seconds and tens of milli-seconds. Impressive ehh?

I was impressed anyway

Amazon’s ElastiCache, if you haven’t already watched the video above, acts in exactly the same way except that the cache is based in their cloud. It takes about 5 mins to set one up, though YMMV, and once it’s done you simply point PHPs Memcache object at its location in the cloud rather than your localhost. The testing that I did showed that the difference in speed wasn’t statistically significant but where this comes in handy is the sharing of Cache between machine. Instead of setting up some elaborate system for storing the same key-value pairs across a number of machines they can all share the same one. That’s very cool!

The above response is very typical of “sour grapes” and protectionism from a company unable to openly compete in a commodity market. Contract terms, open pricing, definitions are all designed to give the same – identical in fact (to the greatest extent possible) to all providers, large and small. Even in this first version of G-Cloud they are adequate, hence there are plenty of companies (255) including tens of private Cloud providers, that have bid. They believe that the definitions are flexible enough to accommodate their services.

Having read the above letter in detail, I can say that it shows why G-Cloud is a great idea. It helps to weed out “special” companies that mistakenly believe that what they sell is unique. It is not. It never is in a commodity market. Even if it is a private cloud, special software or whatever, it is exactly the same as the next persons with comparable SLA. There is a service dimension, and of course price…

It is time to end “complicated IT” where it is not appropriate and end public sector rip-off. The debate between private / public clouds or pointless scare mongering will not stop or even slow this process down – there are already plenty of case studies showing savings of 80% on traditional providers (each one of who was apparently delivering cost reductions already).

Further, the observations on public Cloud are incorrect – simply put public cloud or larger providers, will give a true SLA much higher that “traditional hosting” companies have done in the past… Amazon, for example, offers 99.999% or 11 “9s” on storage. This is a true SLA (meaning it is not financial – their network really delivers that). in any case, the true uptime will depend on the WAN / Internet link, which is the weakest point, hence it worth considering SLA consistency across IT architecture.

On the longer term pricing – if you believe that you have a fantastic deal, great service and technology – you don’t need long term contracts to give you clients a discount – give it anyway – surely they will come back to you… If you wish to lock them into the contract in return for a “discount”, then your offer is not that good to start with. This is simple economics – the more competitive the market, then better the price and value. Lock-ins are designed to reduce competition – so there is your answer.

There are too many biased and incorrect points to mention in the response. it is clear that the author is mostly afraid of the flexibility and power G-Cloud provides to its clients, and wishes, at all costs, to avoid disclosing “special” prices to new clients, but most importantly to their existing ones. Well, the good news, like other Cloud, G-Cloud does not need individual companies support – it is the future, and will happen anyway…

Last year as part of the G-cloud accreditation process I found myself in the hallowed Google offices in London attending an event where the Government Procurement Service (GPS) were trying to de-mystify the tendering process. A noble aim indeed but I was confused by their odd choice of name for the event, “ApplyCamp“, given the distinct lack of tents (though to be fair Google had lots of deckchairs about).

Well last week I found out where the name came from – the GPS stole it from UK GovCamp. Since 2008 these chaps have been running their own brand of agenda-free un-conferences focused on how new technologies and fresh approaches can solve problems within central and local government.

Sounds lovely but I must confess as a veteran of countless physics conferences with agendas stuffed with keynote speakers I was a little bit incredulous as to how an event with no pre-set agenda but over 200 attendees and 10 parallel sessions was going to function. Well I’m happy to say that I’m converted! Within the first hour all 200 people had introduced themselves and via lots of post-its, about 50 short audience pitches for sessions and a clap-ometer we had our agenda sorted (it took another 10 mins for someone to stick it in Google docs and share it via twitter).

We covered tons of stuff but what has stuck with me is the following:

• The Department of Transport have built their own document sharing portal using a combination of AWS s3 for storage, rackspace servers and wordpress. Not only has this cloud solution reduced their hosting costs by 70% plus saving them £100k a year for CMS licenses, they find it better meets their needs and the can manage it all in house – kudos! (more here)
• The Digital by Default program requires that IT managers spend some time in contact centers to really learn how to integrate these services. The stick wont work, we need effective digital services that are fast and easy.
• The Government Digital service has done just that with the gov.uk portal. Its just launched and is lovely, cant wait to start using it in anger (and stealing bits of the design published on github)
• There is a real desire to build better open data platforms within local government and the technology to do it. We just need to show that and build some political will to do it. There is a blog post about the open data workshop here, including my dodgy Google docs drawing.
• While I’m not sure that I quite believe all the hype yet, twitter is a bloody useful tool!
• More people are passionate about improving IT in the public sector than I would have thought – over 200 folk were crammed into the workshops on Saturday (despite the sandwiches being pretty poor!)

Who needs agendas…

Image: nuchylee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

An interesting post at the Software Advice (website) blog on Public Sector and the Cloud was recently pointed out to me and it got me to thinking about the differences between the Public Sectors in the UK and the USA. It also brought to the fore the similarities.

In the post Michael Koploy discusses the security fears associated with hosting data in the cloud, he says:

There is a widespread perception, if not reality, that data stored in the Cloud is more vulnerable to theft. This could be especially problematic with classified or otherwise sensitive information, which is common in the public sector.”

I talked about this issue myself in a recent post and got to thinking that the risks associated with the cloud are no greater than those associated with hosting on dedicated hardware within your organisation.

Mr Koploy’s rationale for thinking about cloud based solutions for the public sector seems to be primarily financial and he points out the benefits of such a platform very well but eventually seems to conclude that there will come a time when some form of equilibrium is reached with cloud based solutions coexisting with traditional enterprise software. I guess I can sort of agree with that though writing this post is the first time I’ve fired up Word (I guess that could be called enterprise software) ever on this machine as I usually write in HTML in my favourite text editor (even now I’m going to have to export this and sort out the apostrophes and quotation marks), I’ve found very few use-cases where using an application on my local machine is better than using one based in the cloud except when it comes to development. That may change eventually though…

His focus is also in terms of Procurement, a realm we have some experience of in terms of our e-Procura/The Arcus Global Process Engine (See our site for an overview) solution.

I guess the major difference between his consideration and mine was a possible distrust of the Government of another nation. Perhaps the recent overturn of SOPA and PIPA should make us rest a little easier? Perhaps if the same fate befalls similar legislation (I’m looking at you ACTA) then all of my paranoia will be assuaged.

Also in the Newsletter: the latest updates on Arcus’ exciting projects, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Virtual Desktop Environment at county councils.

Enjoy Arcus’ Winter Newsletter.

The less publicized, but potentially even more significant benefit of this development is the simple fact that smaller projects lead directly to fewer failures. Look at the following chart for a moment from this paper on large scale software failures by Watts S. Humphrey of the Software Engineering Institute :

Two things should strike you:

1. ICT projects fail a lot, at any size
2. When they get too big they invariably fail

These facts aren’t isolated to government, they relate to all industries and all suppliers. It’s the nature of the game and no one, ignoring what their salespeople will tell you, has ever managed to crack it. There is lots of research into this and no one to the best of my knowledge has found anything approaching the definitive answer yet. Rather we seem to have a large number of partial answers, factors that contribute to the probability of failure, but explain only some types of failure for some of the time. More fundamentally, the enormously complex, non-linear, hard-to-parallelise, hard-to-estimate nature of such projects seems to run flatly against traditional notions of planning and control.

This being the rather bleak fact of the industry in which we find ourselves, we can however take heart in the fact that government moving towards smaller project sizes will in and of itself give us all better value for money as tax payers. Quite simply, spending £100M in £1M project sizes will give much better outcomes than spending £100M on a single project. This is true even if you spend the money with the exact same supplier and the exact same people managing it on the client side.

The government and its forward thinking ICT leadership should therefore be congratulated for taking steps in this direction. Let’s hope they manage to shift the culture of Whitehall to reflect it.

This is interesting as I don’t see the cloud being hosted anywhere in particular… I’m guessing this is probably naive but it’s a nice vision I have of things just working.

I don’t zoom into the nitty gritty of some data center somewhere in a back-lot in the good old US of A – one of those nice zoom-ins where your field of view starts in space, next to a satellite perhaps, and gradually falls closer and closer to California somewhere, perhaps panning past an air-liner on the way down and startling some birds. When we touch down we see some huge warehouse surrounded by razor-wire fences and rabid attack dogs. We get to a steel-plate door and see a harried tech guy with a pocket protector and spectacles (which he has to push up after) getting lazer eye scanned in order to get in. We follow him through the door and, while he moves off to the left, we pan right and raise to see rows upon rows of servers stacks… perhaps with some other industrious techy (different ethnicity but still a guy) swapping out a damaged, perhaps gently smoking, hard drive and replacing it with a fresh one.

Nope. I see some nebulous cloud where everything is taken care of for me, I don’t need to worry about crashed hard-drives, rabid dogs or startling a seagull!

And this is the way I hope everyone sees it but I guess the worry is the recent censorious nature of legislation in the States. No one can fail to have seen links to various campaigns associated with protecting IP lately (though my browsing habits are a little geeky so perhaps I’m wrong). It might be argued that it’s only a matter of time before the legislature in the USA decides that if data is hosted in their country then they should have control over it… in the case of BAe I can understand the concern: You really don’t want the monstrous military-industrial complex sneaking peaks at your latest design for a weapon of mass distraction now do you?

But on the other hand I’m not too sure that that is even possible. The sheer amounts of data and the mechanisms employed by Cloud providers means that the location of any particular bit of data is really quite hard to determine. While security through obscurity isn’t a brilliant policy it does mean that that data will be extremely expensive to find for anyone except you.

I’m not sure how expensive it is to task a Navy Seal team to break into your offices in order to access the data you’re wanting to protect but I’m guessing that it’ll not be cheap. I’m not sure how much it’d be to bribe the lowest paid member of staff who has access to all of your sensitive data but I’m guessing it’ll be a whole lot cheaper than either sending in the Seals or trying to wrangle the exact location of your stuff in the cloud.

Heck, once you start thinking seriously about the risks associated with holding any type of sensitive data then it’s easy to go ever so slightly paranoid! We don’t even need to bring into question the trustfulness of your staff. How much would a local lag charge to break into your premises and nick a particular piece of kit?

So, is there a business case for local clouds?