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Get private cloud support and stay informed

Explore your options for getting support on the B.C. Government Private Cloud platform.

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How to get support

We provide support for the platform and its shared tools. Refer to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to clarify expectations regarding support reviews for both product teams and the Platform Services team.

If you’re new and need advice or guidance 

If you need help or advice on how to get started on the platform, you can:  

  • Post your questions on #devops-how-to channel on Rocket.Chat. Community members will do their best to answer your questions about using the platform, leveraging platform tools and resources, setting up your accounts
  • View our training resources. We provide OpenShift training for onboarding teams
  • Visit our onboarding section for new product teams to help you get prepared to start working on the platform
  • Subscribe our platform services communication to receive important updates 
  • Join the community meetups as it brings the community together to share updates, best practices and demos

Platform status

You can always check how the platform is doing by visiting the platform status dashboard. This dashboard gives you real-time updates on how things are going and lets you see how the platform has been performing historically. It’s a useful tool for keeping an eye on whether everything is running smoothly or if there are any problems.

Get support for an application issue

If your application is offline, check the platform status page. If the status page shows that the platform is experiencing an outage, review the get operational support for a platform issue section. 

If the platform is online and you believe the issue has occurred in your application, you can: 

If you’re still not able to resolve your issue and you wish to report and application incident, we’re available during regular business hours for application support on a best-effort basis.  

To get support, contact us in Rocket.Chat using the #devops-operations channel. We don’t provide application support outside of regular business hours. 

Get support for a platform issue

Our Platform Operations team provides 24/7 operational support for critical incidents.   

A critical incident is an event that affects: 

  • Platform production clusters, including Silver Kamloops, Gold Kamloops and Gold Calgary 
  • Business mission critical platform services, including Artifactory, Vault and ArgoCD 

 
If you think an incident has occurred on OpenShift and it’s preventing the platform or a business mission critical service from working properly, follow the steps here:  

  • Check the platform status page. The dashboard provides real-time updates on platform and tool uptime. If the dashboard indicates that the platform or a tool is offline, the Platform Operations team has already been notified and is working to fix the issue 
     
  • Check the #devops-alerts channel through Rocket.Chat. This is where Platform Operations team informs announcements if outages happen, the posts means the Platform Operations team has identified the problem and is working to fix the issue and through the channel they will provide more advice 
     
  • Report the issue in the #devops-sos channel through Rocket.Chat. If the dashboard doesn’t show the issue and there is no announcement from the Platform Operations team in #devops-alerts, you can report the issue there

Report an incident outside regular business hours 

If it’s a critical platform issue and the issue has occurred outside of business hours, call the B.C. government Service Desk at 250-387-7000, select Option 3 and ask to page the OpenShift Platform Operations team.  

It takes about 30 minutes for the Platform Operations team to respond to critical platform incidents. If the incident isn’t resolved within the first 30 minutes, the team escalates the issue as appropriate until the issue is resolved. 

Only critical incidents are addressed outside of business hours. Non-critical incidents and application issues are addressed as soon as possible during regular business hours. 

After hours support is also available for Keycloak Single-Sign-On (SSO). To report an incident or get support for Keycloak services:

  • Contact the SSO team by emailing them at bcgov.sso@gov.bc.ca
  • Post a message in the #sso channel through Rocket.Chat

Additional support channels

Community-based support 

We follow a community-based support model, and that extends to the open-source community. When your developers have time, we encourage them to engage with other product teams and applications, to share knowledge, skills and expertise. 

For example, they can: 

  • Help patch issues that have been identified in another team’s application 
  • Review code or components that have been suggested by other platform users 
  • Make suggestions on how a tool or feature could be improved 
  • Share their knowledge and expertise by answering questions from other developers 
  • Present the work they’ve been doing on the platform at a platform community meetup 

Stack Overflow 

Join the Government of B.C. Stack Overflow group to ask and answer questions, supporting your colleagues in the developer community. This private space is exclusively for B.C.Public Service developers and technical roles, providing a community-based platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing across projects within the public service.

You can join the group with your IDIR or GitHub account. Simply go to the B.C. Government Stack Overflow login page and choose which credentials you want to login with. Join with only one of these accounts, as the Developer Experience team pays for licenses for each user account. 

Join the Government of B.C. Stack Overflow group. 

Rocket.Chat 

It’s important to include the right information in your questions to help you get a quick and effective answer on Rocket.Chat.

Platform training

OpenShift 101

OpenShift 101 training provides an overview of the build and deploy processes for cloud-native applications.

OpenShift 201

OpenShift 201 training covers advanced technical topics such as resource management, application logging and network policies.

How-to videos and demos

Learn how to better leverage the platform with instructional videos and demos from the Platform Services team.

External training and resources

Resources beyond the B.C. government to offer additional context and support

Technical documentation

The B.C. Government Private Cloud PaaS technical documentation is available for you to use and reference as you build, deploy, maintain and retire your application in the OpenShift platform.  
 
Categories include:  

  • App monitoring 
  • Automation and resiliency 
  • Database and API management  
  • OpenShift projects and access 
  • Platform architecture reference 
  • Platform automation 
  • Reusable code and services 
  • Security and privacy compliance 
  • Secrets management  
  • Training and learning  

Stay informed

Stay connected with the Platform Services Team. They assist both existing ministry clients already using the service and prospective clients.

You can send an email to PlatformServicesTeam@gov.bc.ca.

Subscribe  

To receive notifications about important changes and maintenance activities that may impact your application, subscribe and choose between different mailing lists preferences, these can include:

  • Critical updates: Provides critical information about the platform including outages
  • Platform services updates for the private cloud: Includes critical updates and community engagement efforts like surveys, community update meetings and newsletters 

Join community meetups 

We highly recommend your team attend the Platform community meetups, where we share updates on new tools and services available on the platform, and delve into discussions about application development and security best practices.

These meetups also include demonstrations from other product teams and guest speakers. For the calendar invitation link to upcoming meetups, please send an email to PlatformServicesTeam@gov.bc.ca.