G-Cloud Service ID number: 3280 8603 2237 283 (Public Assured) 7460 4400 0280 608 (Private Assured) 2722 6672 7772 491 (Private Elevated)
UKCloud’s Digital Application Platform is powered by Cloud Foundry - the most popular, open-source PaaS technology - to provide a flexible, scalable digital development platform for developers who just want to publish their code without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Unlike traditional managed PaaS offerings, it provides a full suite of modern, cloud native development toolkits to accelerate end-to-end development, deployment and operation of digital applications.
The Digital Application Platform maximises development time-to-value and provides the highest levels of data security, using UKCloud’s established IaaS and Cloud Storage technologies deployed as a secure, UK-sovereign cloud platform that has been extensively independently validated.
| Feature | Benefit |
| Based on open source Cloud Foundry 2.x | Reduce upskill costs by utilising familiar development languages |
| Supports popular development frameworks; Java, Spring, Ruby, Sinatra, Node.js | Focus on development, testing and scaling of applications |
| Support for open source data-services; MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, RabbitMQ | Faster time to value. One-click code push to Platform |
| Extensible integration for both UKCloud and external data services | Health management reduces monitoring cost whilst raising overall availability |
| Free HTTP Routing, Traffic and load balancing | Repeatable environments and deployments, mitigating misconfiguration or dependency issues |
| Assured; UK hosted by SC and NPPV cleared personnel | Have confidence in who has access to your data |
| Compatible with a majority of Heroku Buildpacks | Reduced complexity of managing infrastructure and supporting services |
| Built in application health management | Underpins deployment and availability of existing open source software |
| Easily, instantly and elastically scale to thousands of users | Remove final bottleneck of Agile code development and deployment |
| Interoperable with other CloudFoundry providers allow re-use of deployments | Cost reduction for managed infrastructure provisioning |
We understand that UK public sector organisations need a dependable service that demonstrates value to stakeholders, which is why UKCloud offers one of the best SLAs on G-Cloud.
What’s more, we back our SLA with Service Credits. If we fall short of our agreement, we’ll compensate you with Service Credits so that you can be confident we have a financial incentive to deliver on our promises.
The table below outlines the SLA and Service Credit details. For more information, see the terms and conditions.
| Service level agreement | 99.50% |
| Portal level agreement | 99.90% |
| Availability calculation | Availability is calculated based on the number of hours in the billing month (for example, 744 hours for months with 31 days), excluding any planned and emergency maintenance. |
| Measurement of SLA | Unavailability applies when the Cloud Foundry environment becomes unresponsive owing to a fault in the UKCloud-controlled Cloud Foundry infrastructure and services which lies with:
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| Key exclusions | The following are examples of what is not covered by the SLA:
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| Service Credit | 3% of monthly spend for affected Cloud Foundry platform. 1% of monthly spend per 1% below service level target or part thereof for the UKCloud API and Portal. |
The UKCloud Digital Application Platform:
UKCloud uses VMware vSphere as the hypervisor for the underlying IaaS service and open-source Cloud Foundry as the application platform.
Global Load Balancing
Application-tuned DDoS protection
UKCloud’s secure Digital Application Platform (formally Cloud Foundry) service is built using the most popular open source PaaS technology to deliver a flexible, scalable application compute platform. Unlike traditional managed PaaS offerings, it provides a modern application platform that accelerates end-to-end development, deployment and operation of digital applications, while raising overall application reliability and availability.
Although Digital Application Platform is a simple, benefits-rich service to consume, it is a complex platform of inter-dependent servers and services, whose deployment, configuration and maintenance requires time and expertise.
By offering Digital Application Platform as a service, we take on all that complexity so that customers can immediately realise the value of Digital Application Platform by simply consuming it.
There are two options:
Yes, we can configure a free 30-day trial of the Public Digital Application Platform.
Trials can be arranged via your approved partner or by contacting UKCloud directly.
Yes, we offer a free version of our Public service with no time limit. The free service provides an initial 512MB of application memory per organisation. Any additional memory consumption is charged according to the Public Digital Application Platform pricing guide.
The service is delivered by UKCloud, a UK company, from two tier 3 UK data centres separated by more than 100km, which are securely connected by high-bandwidth, low-latency dedicated connectivity.
As the service is delivered from UK data centres by a UK company, your data doesn’t leave the UK when at rest.
UKCloud manages and supports the Digital Application Platform using our dedicated support team based in the UK. Support is available via helpdesk ticket or phone.
We monitor, maintain and support our controlled Digital Application Platform infrastructure and services, including:
Owing to the enhanced data isolation levels required, only Private Digital Application Platform is currently available in the Elevated domain.
Both our Public and Private Digital Application Platform services are available in our Assured (previously IL2) domain.
UKCloud’s existing PGA continues to apply to the infrastructure underpinning our services. But since the move to the Government Security Classification Policy (GSCP), we can no longer seek PGA for newer services, such as Digital Application Platform.
We are now required to self-assert our services, with customers taking responsibility for assessing and selecting the most appropriate cloud services to meet their individual security requirements.
We provide confidence that our Digital Application Platform service still meets the highest level of information assurance, which is why we continue to have our platform independently tested and validated, and have the findings made available to customers and partners. This enables SIROs to make an informed decision about any service they choose to consume.
This service is accredited for use over PSN. Connectivity to the N3 network will be considered when an appropriate sponsor submits a requirement.
Our service supports the open-source version of Digital Application Platform, giving customers total freedom from the potential vendor lock-in of a proprietary commercial version of Digital Application Platform
Digital Application Platform is built around the concept of being able to deliver rapidly deployable and scalable digital applications in a secure and reliable fashion, while harnessing the efficiencies of a multi-tenant environment. Although each application you publish resides in its own secure isolated container, these containers still reside on and are accessed via multi-tenant services.
Figure 1: Assured Public Digital Application Platform
Customers who require total data and service isolation should consider our Private Digital Application Platform service, which offers the highest levels of data isolation but less commercial flexibility.
Digital Application Platform is an ever-evolving ecosystem of software and services. Patches and updates can be applied to the platform continuously and seamlessly with minimal or no interruption to the service consumed by a customer.
Any updates which may affect platform availability will be performed in line with our planned maintenance policy.
As standard, localised component failures are tolerated within the infrastructure through elimination of single points of failure (including physical server failure or disk failure).
Although Digital Application Platform is designed to deploy and manage stateless apps (applications that can be killed and re-instantiated without risk of data loss), customers should ensure they maintain a master copy or backup copy of any persistent or dynamic data hosted on this service (such as MySQL DB) by using, for example, our Cloud Storage.
The service supports many popular development frameworks and languages such as:
Other languages and runtimes, (for example PHP, and Python) can be supported through the use of community or customer/partner-developed custom build packs.
Our Digital Application Platform service provides popular open source data service packages deployable within the platform, all supported by the global Digital Application Platform community, including:
Note that these services are offered ‘as is’ with no management, support or availability commitment from UKCloud. We strongly suggest customers ensure they maintain a master copy or backup copy of any persistent or dynamic data hosted on this service (such as MySQL DB) by using, for example, a data service provided by a managed service provider on our Compute as a Service.
External data sources such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server can be consumed via user-provided services.
As a true cloud platform our Digital Application Platform provides full elasticity and scalability. However, in order to protect the integrity of the platform and manage customer spend, soft limits on the number and size of application instances will be in place. These limits may be exceeded on request.