FASTER (Cloud engineering)
Overview.
The Challenge.
The FASTER programme’s requirements for achieving an open development environment included the creation of an MoD Owned Development Platform or Platform as a Service (PaaS). This would allow collaborators of any size to develop and access datasets to support the delivery of new and novel capabilities into a representative Combat System. Digi2al was tasked with testing whether a Development, Security and Operations team could deliver the capability to rapidly insert new technology into such a platform.
The Solution
We conducted a brief Discovery phase of work, followed by a seven month Alpha, which brought together a team with a wide variety of skills – from sonar experts to development operations and business management.
Out of this work, we recommended the increased use of AWS to provide greater flexibility to develop a PaaS. This would allow FASTER to operate in a fully private network, with limited interactions with external web services.
With respect to DevSecOps capability, our engineers designed FASTER from the ground up with infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or through the use of GitOps with ArgoCD. This process was designed to make the deployment process (and many of the components within FASTER) repeatable. We created a tenancy model within Kubernetes to allow the team to quickly deploy new areas for new teams to work in. Finally, we implemented controls such as: Secure Gateways for internet enabled services; mandated encryption in transit and at rest; and golden AMIs.
The Results.
Drawing on our experience with both AWS and MODCloud, we developed a secure PaaS hosted on MODCloud infrastructure, which allows collaborators of any size (e.g. individuals, micro SMEs and primes) to work on innovations using their own devices, as well as MOD-curated data sets. The creation of this platform has already dramatically increased the SDA’s supplier community, with 14 new suppliers now on contract, and our work to nurture and grow this community is ongoing.
Project highlights.
