How can Governments deliver Uber-like citizen services?

More than 60% of the governments globally indicate that improving citizen experience is the number-one priority for them, as they deal with digitally savvy and socially engaged citizens. Citizens are increasingly expecting interactions with governments to be as smooth as those they have with online banking, social media or ride-sharing app providers. They want anytime anywhere access to services. They want services to be personalized and delivered at their fingertips. They want 24/7 availability.

This is possible if citizen services are rendered through apps that are agile, multi-tenant, always up & running, and can be developed and/or updated quickly. Such apps need to scale up and down on demand and need to run in a highly distributed manner, not tied to underlying infrastructure.

Migrating and optimizing legacy monolithic government apps for cloud has helped deliver citizen services efficiently and is expected to continue its growth – Gartner estimates that use of cloud services by governments will grow at 17% per year till 2021. But is migrating existing monolithic apps to cloud alone going to be enough for providing ubiquitous citizen services?

The answer, unfortunately, is no.

Agility and scale that delivering Uber-like citizen services require are not so much a factor of where apps are deployed (cloud), but how those apps are created and deployed. This is where cloud-native approach – that takes advantage of many modern techniques like hybrid cloud, microservices, containerization, Kubernetes and DevOps to effectively operate and scale – is becoming increasingly relevant.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), launched in 2015 by the Linux Foundation, is an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud-native computing universal and sustainable. According to CNCF, cloud-native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster. In fact, a recent study found that business demands for agility and innovation will make cloud-native design a default choice for customer-facing apps by 2020.

Cloud-native apps exhibit certain characteristics that differentiate them from legacy monolithic apps and even the cloud-optimized apps: agility, flexibility, manageability and scalability. In other words, cloud-native apps exhibit consumer-like features.

The question is how does cloud-native design make apps more Uber-like?

Cloud-native approach is vastly different from how legacy monolithic apps are built, or how they are migrated to cloud. The following components play a critical role:

• Microservices refer to an application architectural style that divides an app into components, making them modular. This allows updates to an app on a service-by-service basis, resulting in faster time to market and improved app quality.
• Containers decouple apps from operating systems and offer a convenient unit to encapsulate a small application component, thereby providing manageable app infrastructure for building microservice applications.
• Kubernetes is a container orchestrator to provision, manage, and scale apps.
• DevOps, on the other hand contribute by making communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers, QA engineers, and IT operations efficient, helping reduce time to launch new apps.

Cloud-native apps are built with services packaged in containers, deployed as microservices and managed by Kubernetes, distributed infrastructure through agile DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows to enable faster innovation and business agility.

To summarize, legacy monolithic government apps are not capable of delivering a consumer-like experience in citizen services. Migrating these legacy apps to cloud has limited impact on agility and flexibility, not enough to meet citizen expectations. Governments, to build services with greater flexibility, elasticity and in rapid iteration for delivering a smooth, consumer-like experience to its citizens, need to adopt a cloud-native approach.

It’s important to remember that cloud-native is a new way of doing things and following a new app development process, rather than just infrastructure hosting. In the next blog in this series, we will discuss how governments can adopt cloud-native design principles to make government services more consumer-like.