The Tech Strategy is a living document describing our technical goals and how we plan to meet them.
This page used to be called Data Strategy, but with the addition of sections on cloud infrastructure and DevOps tooling it made sense to broaden its scope.
Hundreds of applications are currently hosted on internal City infrastructure, leading to an undue operational burden on IT and other project maintainers. This in turn creates an culture in which ownership of projects is diffuse, there is no sense of prioritization across projects, and it is difficult to assess the performance of individual applications.
By moving deployment to the cloud, we reduce this operational burden by creating a common, easily-maintainable environment for applications, and by offloading hardware maintenance to cloud service providers.
Cloud Services provides cloud-based deployment environments for project teams throughout the City. For web applications, they provide an autoscaling group environment: a flexible pool of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer, all backed by a PostgreSQL database. We plan to deploy to this environment right from the earliest stages of development, thereby minimizing the cost of adoption.
Our proposed environment is as follows: