Private cloud hosting 101

Describer: A woman with blue rimmed glasses, a silver nose ring and hair up in a loose bun is wearing a light pink and white hoodie over a black t-shirt. She is sitting near a window overlooking a street where you can see a brick wall, trees, a lamp post, bus stop and the glass balconies of the buildings on the other side of the road. 

A transparent black bar fades in and out in the lower third. White text is displayed over top that says “Cailey Jones, Senior Platform Administrator.” 

Cailey Jones: My name is Cailey Jones and I am a senior platform administrator for the OpenShift  platform with the Digital Office. 

Describer: A bald man with a short, trimmed beard wearing a black crewneck sweatshirt over a gray t-shirt. He is sitting near a window and a door. The door is covered in blue green quadrilaterals, and the view out the window is a brick wall. 

A transparent black bar fades in and out in the lower third. White text is displayed over top that says “Oamar Kanji, software developer.”

Oamar Kanji: Hey, I’m Oamar Kanji. I’m a software developer here at the ministry of Citizen’s Services. 

Describer: A man with short curly hair, wearing an un-zipped navy-blue fleece jacket over a gray t-shirt is sitting in a beige pilot’s chair. He is sitting in a room with turquoise wall on his right and a while wall with a frosted over window on his left. There is a white light switch on the white wall above his left shoulder.

A transparent black bar fades in and out in the lower third. White text is displayed over top that says “Nick Corcoran, Security Architect.”

Nick Corcoran: Hi, I’m Nick Corcoran, I’m the security architect on the platform services team. 

Describer: A woman with gold, round rimmed glasses, shoulder length hair and a necklace with a wire shaped diamond is wearing a beige sweater. She is standing in front of a light blue wall. 

A transparent black bar fades in and out in the lower third. White text is displayed over top that says “Alex Lloyd User Experience (UX) Researcher.” 

Alex Lloyd: My name is Alex Lloyd, and I’m the UX researcher for the private cloud team. 

Describer: A woman with dark shoulder length hair is wearing a pink ascot scarf and a beige knitted sweater. She is sitting in a beige captain’s chair in front of a white book shelf in a room with a turquoise wall, a brick cover pillar and a window that is covered by dark brown blinds.

A transparent black bar fades in and out in the lower third. White text is displayed over top that says “Olena Mitovska Director of Private and Public Cloud Services.”

Olena Mitovska: My name is Olena Mitovska, I’m the director of private and public cloud services in the Digital Office, in the ministry of Citizen’s Services in the BC Government. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “What is OpenShift?”

Cailey Jones comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Cailey Jones: OpenShift is a development platform that we’re using for modernizing the way software gets developed in government.

Describer: Alex Lloyd comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Alex Lloyd: It allows for teams to build modern cloud-native applications in a very easy and safe environment. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “How does OpenShift benefit software teams?”

Olena Mitovska comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Olena Mitovska: The benefits of the private cloud OpenShift platform go beyond just the technology. 

While working on the platform, you will be a part of the community of more than 150 other product teams that strive to initiate a culture shift within the government that values collaboration, communication and speed. This is a community that takes care of and supports each other and works together to solve the unsolvable.

Describer: Oamar Kanji comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Oamar Kanji: OpenShift makes it easier for teams to provision their server resources and go through that journey.

Describer: Nick Corcoran comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Nick Corcoran: The big value is the speed, right? The speed at which we can produce a viable product that’s going to deliver business value and reduces those barriers that we’ve had traditionally of having to do things through iStore requests. 

The other big thing is that there is a lot of sharing within our community. So, the ability to leverage those images or code that other teams have produced already gives us a great starting place and lets us deliver the value to our businesses even faster.

Describer: Cailey Jones comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Cailey Jones: We use OpenShift because it is based on the Kubernetes technology, which is a technology for running containers that is a very commonly used open-source technology. So it has a lot of support in the community and OpenShift is specifically a type of Kubernetes that is run by Red Hat, so we kinda get the best of both worlds. The benefit of open source, and the benefit of having a vendor supported product.

Describer: Oamar Kanji comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Oamar Kanji: I really enjoy the documentation and some of the guides provided by Red Hat, and for me that’s been the best part. Because I have an idea of what I want to do and I don’t have to look too far to find good documentation that can show me what I need to do and all the commands necessary. So for me, that’s been the best part and that is what makes it easy. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “Which application run on the BC Gov’s OpenShift platform?”

Olena Mitovska comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Olena Mitovska: We have close to 400 applications running in the private cloud OpenShift platform. All of the applications are important and provide essential services to the citizens of British Columbia. Among other services we have court services that judges use in the courtrooms to obtain materials for hearings. RCMP services, family and child support services, natural resources ministries have multiple applications hosted on the platform as well, including wildfire predictive services and mines digitial services. BC Registries and Service BC teams host services on the platform as well.

Describer: Nick Corcoran comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Nick Corcoran: The ability that teams have had to be able to stand things up quickly, especially when we’ve had things come up like our COVID registration have been super valuable to the public and that’s really the one that comes to mind as the big one for me because of the impact it had.

Describer: Alex Lloyd comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Alex Lloyd: I think the application I use the most on the platform is the BC Services Card and during the height of the pandemic I probably used the vaccination app the most, the vaccine card.

Describer: Cailey Jones comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Cailey Jones: I think a really good example of an application running on the OpenShift platform is one of the very first ones that I had the opportunity to work on, or I guess, work with the team that was developing. It was an application that was developed to help BC cattle farmers be able to schedule their access to the public grazing pastures. It basically was just a calendar in which people could schedule access to the pastures. It wasn’t a particularly big project, and one of the problems that the Government was facing previously with the way software was developed was that there was a lot of overhead. It made the development of these really small applications not very financially feasible.  

OpenShift really helped to change that and made that kind of application a lot more financially viable so it was something that was one of the first applications on OpenShift and I think works really as an example of some of the stuff that might never have been done if not for the creation of the OpenShift platform. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “How does OpenShift help with security?”

Nick Corcoran comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Nick Corcoran: One thing that is huge about security is that it’s all about driving down the opportunity for bad things to happen. Part of that can happen as a result of human error. A lot of our tooling is built on automation, which helps reduce that opportunity for human error to happen. So it allows for consistency and reduces that footprint of errors that could become exploitable in the future. We also have tooling on our platform to help teams understand where their weaknesses are within their code, within the images that they deliver so that they can remediate those before they can get exploited. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “What is containerization?”

Alex Lloyd comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Alex Lloyd: I guess the way containerization was explained to me as a non-technical person was if you have different rooms in an apartment, so you have different environments, and if something goes wrong in one environment it’s not going to affect all the different rooms. So if you have a flood in one room, the whole house isn’t flooded, it’s just contained in one room.

Describer: Oamar Kanji comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Oamar Kanji: Containerization… it’s really helpful because it solves the “oh, it worked on my computer” problem… “but for some reason it’s not working on yours.” So once an app is containerized, we can all play with it use it because we’re all using the exact same thing.

Describer: Cailey Jones comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Cailey Jones: Not all applications are suited for containerization, but a lot of applications, especially the sort of applications that are run by government and especially the ones that are citizen-facing really benefit from containerization. 

Containerization allows us to develop software using these sort of modular images. It means that the first time that you say, create a container to run a database, you now have that and can re-use that again later even for slightly different purposes. It’s very efficient when it comes to being able to add more containers of the same software to be able to handle additional load. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “Where is the data stored?”

Alex Lloyd comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Alex Lloyd: So we have two data centres. One is in Kamloops and our fallback data centre is in Calgary, Alberta.

Describer: Nick Corcoran comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Nick Corcoran: We’re also investigating some other clusters within the public cloud space, that will provide some value there, but we’re still in the early days of investigating that. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “How much does this cost?”

Olena Mitovska comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Olena Mitovska: Building and hosting your new service on the private cloud OpenShift platform is free today. It will continue to be free at least until the end of 2023/2024 fiscal year. So we don’t expect there will be any cost recovery model in place, at least until April 1st 2024.

Describer: Nick Corcoran comes on screen in the same setting as before.

Nick Corcoran: Now, free from a financial standpoint in hosting, the ministry teams still have to pay for their developers and any contractors that they may need to develop their applications. 

Describer: A black screen with white text that reads “cloud.gov.bc.ca/private-cloud” on the top line and the bottom line reads “platformservicesteam@gov.bc.ca”

Narrator: If you’d like to find out more about our service, check out the documentation on our website or reach out to us at platformservicesteam@gov.bc.ca.