Warning This document has not been updated for a while now. It may be out of date.

Last updated: 18 May 2020

Learn how GOV.UK works

Welcome to GOV.UK! Let’s start off by saying that GOV.UK publishing system is quite complex. It can be daunting task to get to know the platform. This page is meant as a starter guide to learning about GOV.UK.

2nd line

• 2nd line
• Access to Licensify for Third Parties
• Licensify - supporting licensing
• Out of hours support (on-call)
• PagerDuty
• Rules for getting production access
• Subject Access Request (SAR)
• Welcome to 2nd line
• Zendesk

A/B testing

• How A/B testing works

Applications

• Architectural deep-dive of GOV.UK
• Architecture overview of GOV.UK applications
• Configure linting
• Conventions for Rails applications
• Node classes without redundancy

Assets

• Assets: how they work

AWS

• AWS IAM Key Rotation
• Common AWS tasks for 2nd line support
• How to raise a support ticket with AWS
• Migration to AWS

Backups

• MongoDB backups
• PostgreSQL backups

CDN & Caching

• Our content delivery network (CDN)

Cookies

• Cookie consent on GOV.UK
• Cookies and sessions in GOV.UK frontend apps

data.gov.uk

• Architecture of data.gov.uk
• Data.gov.uk Contracts Archive
• WMS map previews on data.gov.uk

Dependencies

• Policy on keeping software current

Deployment

• The development and deployment pipeline

Docker

• Intro to GOV.UK Docker
• Intro to GOV.UK Docker (Advanced)

Documentation

• Documentation style guide
• READMEs for GOV.UK applications

Emails

• Email notifications: how they work
• How we use GOV.UK Notify

Frontend

• Analytics on GOV.UK
• Find a rails template based on a GOV.UK URL or vice verca
• Frontend architecture
• Local frontend development
• The component system
• Which browsers we support

GitHub

• How we use GitHub
• Repository mirroring

Incidents

• Incident management guidance

Infrastructure

• app_domain handling in GOV.UK during migration to AWS
• Concourse
• Domain Name System (DNS) records
• GOV.UK and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
• GOV.UK’s environments (integration, staging, production)
• Load Testing
• New instances fail to provision
• Rollback Puppet if Jenkins is broken
• Upgrade Terraform

Knowledge Graph

• Knowledge Graph

Learning GOV.UK

• Dictionary of concepts on GOV.UK
• Responsibilities of a Tech Lead
• Where to find what documentation

Logging

• How logging works on GOV.UK
• Request tracing

Monitoring

• Environment data sync
• Grafana
• Graphite and deployment dashboards
• Icinga
• Metrics
• Pingdom Bouncer canary check
• Screens that we have in the office
• Sentry
• Sidekiq
• Tools: Icinga, Grafana and Graphite, Kibana, Fabric and friends
• Uptime Metrics

Notify Emergency Alerts

• What is GOV.UK Notify Emergency Alerts?

Publishing

• How the draft stack works
• How the topic taxonomy works
• How the world taxonomy works
• Related links
• What data we expose as schema.org structured data

Team tools

• GitHub Trello Poster

Testing

• Brakeman
• Jenkins CI infrastructure
• Pact Broker

Transition

• Transition architecture

More in the Learning GOV.UK section

Learn

• Dictionary of concepts on GOV.UK
• Responsibilities of a Tech Lead
• Where to find what documentation

How to...

• Ask for help
• Get started on GOV.UK