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

• Before you start on 2nd line
• Change in-hours time period for daylight savings
• Out of hours support (on-call)
• Welcome to 2nd line
• What we do on 2nd line

A/B testing

• How A/B testing works

Applications

• Architecture overview of GOV.UK applications

Assets

• Assets: how they work

Backups

• MongoDB backups
• MySQL backups
• PostgreSQL backups

CDN & Caching

• Cookies and sessions in GOV.UK frontend apps
• Our content delivery network (CDN)

data.gov.uk

• Architecture of data.gov.uk
• Data.gov.uk Contracts Archive

Databases

• PgBouncer
• PostgreSQL Advisory Locks

Dependencies

• Policy on keeping software current

Deployment

• The development and deployment pipeline

DNS

• Domain Name System (DNS) records

Emails

• Email Alert API analytics

Frontend

• Frontend architecture
• The component system
• Which browsers we support

GitHub

• GitHub Enterprise
• How we use GitHub
• Repository mirroring

Incidents

• Incident management guidance

Infrastructure

• Concourse
• GOV.UK and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
• GOV.UK in AWS
• GOV.UK’s environments (integration, staging, production)
• Stacks in AWS

Learning GOV.UK

• Dictionary of concepts on GOV.UK
• Where to find what documentation

Logging

• How logging works on GOV.UK

Monitoring

• Graphite and deployment dashboards
• Metrics
• Pingdom Bouncer canary check
• Sidekiq
• Tools: Icinga, Grafana and Graphite, Kibana and Fabric
• Uptime Metrics

Publishing

• How the draft stack works
• How the topic taxonomy works
• How to publish a facet group
• What data we expose as schema.org structured data

Team tools

• GitHub Trello Poster
• Hubot (Slack bot)

Testing

• Jenkins CI infrastructure
• Pact Broker

Transition

• Transition architecture