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Monday 23 December 2013

List of the tools & services used to build GOV.UK


I've always thought the GOV.UK site was well built aesthetically and even in it's robustness. After visiting a couple of other government sites I decided to find out what was used to build the site and what makes GOV.UK so amazing compared to the others.

I was well pleased to find out that there was a blog post on their website dedicated to the tools and services used to develop the site.

I've listed some of them here:

Frontend:
  • HTML/CSS/JS - using HTML5 where appropriate, with a heavy focus on accessibility, and validating where we can
  •  Jquery
  • SCSS
  • A2-Type for font production 

The core of the servers:
  • Infrastructure As A Service (basically, they don't host in-house servers. This will ease scaling and mitigate maintenance costs) from Skyscape
  • Akamai as the Content Delivery Network 
  • Servers run on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04
Redirection:
  • nginx used for redirection
  • perl used to manage redirections  
  • node.js was used to build a side-by-side browser for reviewing redirections



 Applications
  •  The majority of our applications are written in ruby, based on either Ruby on Rails or Sinatra.
  • A few components are written in Scala and built on top of Play 2.0.
Databases and other storage:
Monitoring, managing and alerting:
  •  statsd, used to gather metrics from their apps
  • logs collected with logstash
  • Graphite used for visual graph analysis
Supporting tools
  • Code is tested with Jenkins
  • Prototyping with heroku
  • Email (internal alerts) sending via Amazon SES
 
To view the whole list of tools and services used, you can view the blog post here by digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

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