Life after the GOV.UK PaaS

If you're a user of the GOV.UK PaaS, you know the bad news already: your platform is going away, and you’ll have to independently procure your managed cloud services from now on. But there’s a pretty thick silver lining here. With direct procurement, the range of hosted services available to your organisation is about to increase dramatically.

Aiven are, and will continue to be until the end of the GOV.UK PaaS, the providers of the OpenSearch® and InfluxDB® services you can find there.

The new G-Cloud-13 framework is a purchasing vendor service run by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), and unlike the GOV.UK PaaS platform it offers direct access to vendors via a centrally negotiated government contract. This means you’ll continue to have the managed service offerings of OpenSearch and InfluxDB that you currently enjoy (via Aiven) to choose from—but you’ll also have a range of other managed open source solutions that you can choose from Aiven.

Come over to Aiven

Aiven is a provider of managed open source data technologies on all major clouds globally. As an existing GOV.UK vendor, Aiven is already pre-vetted and ticks all the boxes.

And the best thing of all is that if you move from Aiven’s OpenSearch of InfluxDB service on the GOV.UK PaaS, we can pretty much guarantee a quick no-downtime migration.

Run your eye over these benefits of the Aiven platform:

• API-first architecture: you can automate a lot of your processes with Aiven’s API, whether you use Kubernetes or Terraform or a proprietary framework. No clickopsing, just jobs running and taking care of business.
• Information assurance: Aiven has a wide array of certifications and compliances, detailed information on all of which is available on request.
• Pay-as-you-go: with Aiven, you’re not buying servers, you’re buying a service, which you can stop using any time you want—and also stop paying for it.
• Open source: if you want to understand what your infrastructure is made of and how it works, and to avoid locking yourself in to a single vendor, always choose open source software and services. Everything at Aiven is fully open source.
• Cloud-agnostic: run your jobs on any hyperscaler cloud, anywhere in the world - or on all of them. Piping data from cloud to cloud is easy with Aiven.

Aiven services

Aiven’s service portfolio includes a range of best of breed open source technologies that allow you to manage your data—whether streaming, operational, or analytics—from one easy to use console. Here is a quick look at what we offer, each fully managed and carefree.

Search and find: Aiven for OpenSearch

You may already know Aiven for OpenSearch from the GOV.UK PaaS. It’s a high-powered, versatile search engine, optimized for free text search and customizable visual analytics. OpenSearch is ideal for information-heavy, search-oriented pages that provide crucial information for end users.

Big time data: Aiven for InfluxDB^®, Aiven for M3^®, Aiven for ClickHouse^®

Aiven for InfluxDB®, as offered on the GOV.UK PaaS, is just one of our services designed for data-intensive applications like analytics. Our newest arrival, Aiven for ClickHouse, is a high-performance data warehouse, the fastest open source columnar database on the market.
If your data volumes are truly epic, you could take a look at M3. Often used together with Grafana, M3 is a true open source time series database designed for massive environments.

Easy streaming: Aiven for Apache Kafka^®

Aiven provides a full solution for you to build a streaming service: a complete ecosystem of solutions and services built around Apache Kafka. It lets you transport, manage, process, operate and govern your organization’s streaming data efficiently.

Along with Apache Kafka itself, we offer managed Apache Kafka Connect for connectivity, Apache Kafka® MirrorMaker 2 for replication, Apache Flink® for stream processing, and as the cherry on top, Klaw for governance over the whole system. With Klaw, you can specify who is able to write to which topic using team and role definitions.

SQL goodness: Aiven for PostgreSQL^®, Aiven for MySQL^®

PostgreSQL is an advanced, mature and scalable relational database that can handle just about anything you throw at it. Its extensive toolkit and large community make it an easy open source choice. Aiven for PostgreSQL is your truly future-proof data solution.

But if you’re looking for something light and nimble, take a look also at MySQL, the world’s most popular open source relational database and something of a younger cousin of PostgreSQL. Less fully featured than PostgreSQL, Aiven for MySQL nevertheless makes a good starter database for limited needs.

Metrics and analytics: Aiven for Grafana^®

Aiven for Grafana is a widely used open source monitoring, visualisation and alerting service. You can collect data from various Aiven services and display them in a coherent dashboard. When combined with M3, it scales to cover even the largest infrastructure monitoring cases.

Robust data service: Aiven for Cassandra^®, Aiven for Caching

Efficient caching can provide a faster user experience for your app. Aiven for Caching, an extremely fast, robust in-memory key-value database, is your best choice.

And last but by no means least, to provide stability and durability in the face of expanding and changing volumes of data, consider Aiven for Cassandra. It’s a distributed NoSQL database that is famously scalable and fault-tolerant.

Here’s a tip

One way to use Aiven services is to build yourself an observability platform. Plug Aiven for InfluxDB or M3 to Aiven for OpenSearch and Grafana (or indeed any other monitoring service you like, but getting all the bits from Aiven does make for a smoother experience) and easily keep tabs on your data infrastructure.

The reason we’re bringing this up especially is that, while working with the GDS team that managed the GOV.UK PaaS, this proved to be a simple, cost effective solution to their observability needs. Deploying it as a managed service reduced their up-front costs and management overhead.

Next step

If you’re an existing user of the GOV.UK PaaS, we have a fast lane for you to spin up your services with Aiven. And even better, we’ll help you get your services migrated, too, together with the GOV.UK PaaS team.

See the chat box in the corner of your browser? Use that to get in touch with the designated GOV.UK PaaS team at Aiven, and get the ball rolling now.

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