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Last updated: 6 Sep 2023

GOV.UK Kubernetes cluster documentation for developers

Use this documentation to find out how to:

start using the GOV.UK Kubernetes clusters
manage your GOV.UK app on Kubernetes

Introduction

The GOV.UK website and content management system (known internally as the publishing platform) are hosted on Kubernetes clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Kubernetes is a widely-used, open-source container orchestration system for managing containerised workloads such as GOV.UK’s.

Kubernetes is designed for automation and emphasises declarative configuration and immutable infrastructure. It provides mechanisms for:

efficiently and automatically fitting workloads into available compute resources
resilient, “self-healing” deployments
service discovery and load balancing
automated rollouts and rollbacks
quotas and isolation of compute resources between workloads
authentication, authorisation and audit logging
secrets and configuration management
managing persistent storage

See the official Kubernetes overview documentation for more information about Kubernetes.