UK politicians to draft outage blueprint after AWS calamity

The UK government will publish a plan for handling future cloud outages after last week's AWS failure knocked out several departments. Ian Murray, minister for digital government and data, said that the AWS outage on October 20 affected a number of departments and suppliers, although all services were restored by the evening …

[Roland6]

Dan tomlinson is obviously a politician..

>"exchequer secretary Dan Tomlinson replied that most core systems would continue to operate. "Internal connectivity between HMRC sites and hosted services is maintained through private, dedicated links that do not depend on the public internet," he said.

"This ensures that critical processing and internal operations can continue without interruption." "

So that okay the cloud services can go down, but internal operations won't be affected because their connection to the cloud services is via private dedicated link...

Lets hope Ian Murray's cyber plan is more proactive and sets the direction of travel to reduce dependence on the US cloud providers....

[Anonymous Coward]

Cargo cults

Wishful hallucinations of politicians meet the reality. Promises are unlimited. Implementation is way out of budget and deadlines.

Is it singularity already, since complexity has seemingly overwhelmed the governance?

Increasing complexity requires increasing specialization and diversification of skills. Experience is becoming obsolete faster than ever. Competence is expensive.

Meanwhile billionaires are running out of ideas how to better splash on toys and mansions, while public education, housing, and healthcare are getting squeezed.

But socialist governments are not much better wasting public money - as incompetence flourishes on lack of skills and corrupt nature of "job creation". While both the gullible public and public servants are being mislead, corrupted or reaped off by the corporate world.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Cargo cults

But socialist governments are not much better wasting public money

See there is a misconception here. Labour and Conservatives are not socialists. If they were, you will see money being splashed on housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure, working people. Instead they splash money on usual suspect big corporations and the rich, while general public doesn't get even basic services. This is classic fascism. Marriage of government and corporations.

They project themselves as socialist, so that people associate socialist = bad and so they can continue with status quo, as nobody will dare to elect actual socialist party.

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need yet another blueprint

Outage blueprint? How about HMG shows some leadership and starts to actively diversify its cloud workloads?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

Knowing politicians, I suspect it's more likely to end up as a daft outrage blueprint than a draft outage blueprint.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

Or use their own datacentres rather than relying on US corporations (with all the risks to reliability and soveriengty which that entails).

[Graham Cobb]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

It used to be that relying on the US was a safe proposition for HMG - after all , US weapons were protecting us and other considerations seemed small in comparison.

But, in a post-Trump world, who knows what US policy might be (from one day to the next, even)? If the UK did something Trump didn't like (say, supporting Ukraine, or sending RAF planes from Cyprus to protect a relief convoy going to Gaza, or something), the US could decide that AWS could no longer do business with HMG and, poof!!, all of a sudden no tax can be collected!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

Yep - UK has c.400 DC's, most of which would cry out for that business if the Government ever decided that actually controlling their national data was important.

All those DC's have connectivity, power and certificstions - but most importantly can be used NOW!

(Not some time in the next 3-5 years if they get the new ones built, find out how to power them and drain the aquifers to cool them)

Beginning to think the techies in Gov today are either completely clueless, or just don't know how to deliver innovation unless its wrapped in a Microsoft or AWS bag.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

Those free tickets to <INSERT MAJOR SPORTING EVENT> aren't gonna pay for themselves....

[Curlypig]

Re: We don't need yet another blueprint

How strange. As of early evening 29/10/25 we have simultaneous global Azure and AWS outages. Is the blueprint ready yet?

[Rich 2]

You could do a lot with that

“Central government departments hold 41 live contracts with AWS worth a total of £1.11 billion”

For that kind of money, the govt could build its own distributed bit barns complete with its own private “cloud”, whilst creating jobs for the locals too

Obviously, instead of doing this, they would give the money to some twats like Fujitsu or Serco who would spend it all on bonuses and deliver bugger-all, while the price spirals out of all reasoning

Oh well. Nice idea I suppose

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You could do a lot with that

Crapita joined the chat....

[Rich 2]

Re: You could do a lot with that

Thank you - I knew it began with a C but couldn’t remember the name!

[Richard 12]

Re: You could do a lot with that

That's only the direct contracts.

There's also an unknown number of indirect ones, where the supplier is actually running on AWS. Most of those probably haven't even told the buyer - the "small" suppliers mostly don't.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: You could do a lot with that

Cloud version of dropshipping. Sell someone else's product and whack massive markup.

[Secon]

Re: You could do a lot with that

>For that kind of money, the govt could build its own distributed bit barns complete with its own private “cloud”, whilst creating jobs for the locals too

Back in 2009/10 that was exactly the plan.

At that point AWS and Microsoft were just teeny little offerings and Cabinet Office mostly used Google (and loved them).

G-Cloud then was an actual programme to BUILD a UK Gov Cloud; we knew how to do it, had all the security and assurance stuff worked out and were pretty much good to go.

Then someone in OGC decided we should 'just let the market decide'.

So shortly after we downgraded all our data classifications (cos none of the cloud platforms could meet any of the required standards) and the future of UK Sovereign Cloud was writ.

Could we build it now?

Probably - this used to be 'Definitely,' but nowadays too many folks have sold their technical skills to Microsoft for us to be 100% confident of ever doing anything else.

Bit if we wanted to I daresay enough folks still have the skills, and lots appear to be willing to engage in such a project.

Gov however will never go for it - our politicians and public sector CxO's think the future has to be MS or AWS coloured.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until AWS is back up?

Is that the whole plan?