WP1161 Provision of WebOps(x2 roles) to support the GAAP Programme

Tender description

Summary of the work The Government PaaS team at GDS require experienced WebOps expertise to provide additional development and operational input to the existing team to deliver an excellent user experience. The requirement includes providing skills transfer to public servants on the team. We envisage that two WebOps infrastructure experts are required initially. Latest start date 04/01/2017 Budget Range £600 per person per day maximum. Why the Work is Being Done Hosting is one of the most time-consuming barriers for new digital services and often teams spend significant time solving the same problems in different ways over and over again. PaaS will host a range of digital services so that teams across government do not have to build and manage complex infrastructure, and can instead focus on delivering digital services to the end user. PaaS will reduce duplication as teams will no longer have to build a platform or their own hosting stack each time they build a service. Teams can focus on building and running services rather than building platforms. Problem to Be Solved Service teams need PaaS for government to be fully functional, operationally stable, and supported so that they can realise their hosting strategies. Who Are the Users As a person building/running a service * I need somewhere to host it here my service is resilient, secure, and my users' data kept safe * I want integration to be quick and straightforward * I want be able to specify and access the backing services which I need * I want to know it is supported * I want to reduce costs through efficiency - by only paying for space I use, by not having to pay to build or buy a platform. My effort and resources are focused on providing a good service experience to my users, " Early Market Engagement Not used. Existing Team Multi-disciplinary team, mainly WebOps and back end developers, technical architect, user researchers, product managers, delivery managers and tech author. Current Phase Not applicable Skills & Experience • Collaborating closely with colleagues in order to meet users’ needs • Debugging a complex, multi-server service in a high availability environment • Using languages such as Ruby, Python, Go, and Java within an existing, production codebase • Experience of developing with Cloudfoundry and BOSH and using in a production environment • Experience of commodity cloud providers such as AWS • Using configuration management tools such as Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, etc • Experience of setting up and using a continuous delivery and deployment pipeline using Concourse • Experience of deploying monitoring solutions such as Datadog • Familiarity with network protocols – TCP/IP, HTTP, TLS, etc • Understanding of application deployment strategies, continuous integration and version control (git, svn, bzr, mercurial) • Understand the concept of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) • Rigorous approach to software development (TDD, code review, pairing) • Likes pairing and knowledge sharing • Ability to develop tooling for automation and provisioning Nice to Haves • Interested in DevOps, and infrastructure as code. • Familiarity with the process of adding features to open source software and the approach to documentation • Experience administering common open source databases like Postgres, MongoDB, Redis etc • Experience supporting a production environment and supporting technical customers/users • Working in an agile environment • Understand the concept of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Work Location London. Working Arrangments Monday to Friday based in our office (currently Holborn we will be moving to Aldgate in the next 6 months) starting work by 9.30am, 7.5 hours per day + lunch time There will be a requirement for team members to participate in the out of hours(OOH) support rota - on average one week in six. The OOH support will be paid separately from the day rate of the winning supplier candidates. Security Clearance SC Security clearance is required. Additional T&Cs Not used. No. of Suppliers to Evaluate 3 Proposal Criteria • Approach and methodology (meeting all Cultural-fit criteria) • How successful the approach has been implemented before • Technical expertise(Meeting all 'Essential' and 'Nice to have' criteria listed) Cultural Fit Criteria • Work as a team with our organisation and other suppliers • Transparent and collaborative when making decisions • Have a no-blame culture and encourage people to learn from their mistakes • Collaborating closely with colleagues in order to meet users’ needs • Likes pairing and knowledge sharing • Like to work in an agile environment Payment Approach Capped time and materials Evaluation Weighting Technical competence 65% Cultural fit 15% Price 20% Questions from Suppliers 1. if you are looking for more than one specialist, you will need to post them as individual opportunities under digital specialists. Otherwise they must be posted as outcome. This is an outcome. The title was entered incorrectly, it should have read: WP1161 Delivery of the PAAS Programme (WebOps). Apologies for any confusion. 2. 1) whats the expected contract length 2) Please clarify if SC can be attained if the supplier provides BPSS? 1) Up to 1 year2) Yes 3. Is the 600pd guidance a hard limit or will rates over this still be in consideration? It is yes, we will not be considering proposals with rates higher than this. 4. Latest start date is shown as 4/1/17. Can we therefore assume that you do not need these resources to start with you during 2016? We would prefer an earlier start date, the date given is the latest date. 5. You mentioned experience of setting up and using a CI and deployment pipeline using Concourse – would other experience instead of Concourse be considered such as: Jenkins, GIT, GitLab, Mercurial, Stash, BitBucket? We prefer and would like concourse experience for this role, though experience using other tools to manage a build and deploy pipeline using version control is helpful if concourse experience is not available. 6. We understand that a devops/webops role is focused primarily on deployment and infrastructure, automating the deployment process, and collaborating with developers. However you also mention software development techniques (e.g. TDD) and use of languages including Java, Ruby, Python and Go which are perhaps more traditional "software developer" skills. Would you potentially be open to taking on all-round software developers, who are skilled in the languages and environments you use, and can offer web ops as part of an overall skillset? Or are you only considering specialists in web ops? We are after skilled web ops specialists to deliver our Programme.