Benefits of using the Application Platform

The Application Platform captures various patterns that have matured within the DPS development community and makes them easy to adopt on new projects.

Build new services quickly

Historically development teams would spend several weeks working on Sprint Zero to create a build pipeline for their skeleton project. Often Sprint Zero is never completed and projects start with the burden of technical debt.

By using our Project Bootstrapper it is possible to deploy a skeleton project to production in hours. This allows developers to quickly start delivering user stories and add value to the end users.

Adopt common standards

Innovation is encouraged but we don’t want teams diverging too much. Otherwise we end up with many solutions to the same problems causing a maintenance headache for both developers and operations.

By using standard components available in the Application Platform we can manage services in a consistent way and share best practice.

Increase institutional knowledge

As the trickle of new services turns into a flood we find that many projects are at different levels of maturity. These then require different levels of support from teams of different sizes.

By using standard components we share knowledge of our development practices. This makes it easier to move developers between teams and provide the right levels of support where needed.

Secure services

Security is no longer an afterthought tagged onto the end of a project by overworked security and operations staff. To maintain a secure estate we must build security best practices in from the start of a project and in a consistent manner.

By using our various build tools it’s easier to keep services up to date with the latest security patches and identify security vulnerabilities.

Add observability into services

No service runs in isolation and gaining a holistic view of the whole estate presents difficult challenges. There are many open source technologies to help with observability but these need coordinating between services to be successful.

By using our application templates we standardise the capturing of telemetry and tracing. This allow us to provide a common toolset for observing our suite of microservices.

Take advantage of mature development patterns

Many problems facing developers in HMPPS have been “solved” and using these patterns gives teams a head start.

By using our various build plugins and libraries we have captured some of these patterns to distribute amongst teams. This allows developers to focus on providing value to end users.

_{This page was last reviewed on 04-Sep-2024, next review will be on 04-Dec-2024.}