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Making Critical Government Information More Resilient
on June 4, 2020
A roundup of steps that federal agencies, and other government entities, can take right now to improve the resilience of their websites and serve information more efficiently to the people that need it
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A token of our affection - A field guide to USWDS 2
on April 21, 2020
We recently worked with the cloud.gov team to update their public site, cloud.gov, to United States Web Design System 2. The USWDS provided concepts we were able to use to translate designs into code a lot faster and deliver higher fidelity results once we understood how to use them.
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4 benefits to using the full TTS technology stack
on March 27, 2018
When Performance.gov re-launched on February 12, it became one of hopefully many websites to use the full suite of the Technology Transformation Services’ (TTS) products and services, from hosting to design.
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To get things done, you need great, secure tools
on February 27, 2017
To folks new to government, one of the most surprising differences between our work and work in the private sector are the barriers in accessing commercially available software, and commercially available Software as a Service (SaaS) in particular. There are many good reasons for these barriers but digital teams need great tools to get work done and compliance requires tradeoffs associated with time to initial delivery and accommodation of constraints that are different from the private sector.
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cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized for use by federal agencies
on February 2, 2017
We’re delighted to announce that cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized, which enables agencies to quickly transition their web-based services to efficient and easy-to-use cloud hosting. FedRAMP Authorized status marks completion of a comprehensive security and compliance assessment that enables federal agencies to start using cloud.gov with significantly reduced effort. cloud.gov is a government-customized hosting platform that takes care of technical infrastructure and security compliance requirements.
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Vendors and government strengthen partnership at Technology Industry Day
on September 19, 2016
The Technology Transformation Service (TTS) is already absorbing the first-mover risk of introducing modern tools and techniques, but we know that only with the help of industry will this transformation be able to spread across the federal government. As we all bring agile methodologies, human-centered design, and modular design to the government, the opportunity to improve federal digital services is immense.
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James Scott: Automating and engineering a better government
on September 12, 2016
James Scott's career has taken him from The University of Virginia to Intel before landing at 18F. Here, he has worked on cloud.gov and our diversity guild. His advice for people thinking about joining us: Do it.
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Patterns for managing multi-tenant cloud environments
on August 10, 2016
When 18F started, deploying government services into a public cloud was still fairly uncommon. However, everything 18F has built has been deployed into Amazon Web Services (AWS), including cloud.gov. Over that time, our AWS account has grown in size and complexity and we needed a new approach to make sure it remains manageable.
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Bret Mogilefsky: Finding the big good in cloud.gov
on July 28, 2016
Bret Mogilefsky spent most of his career working in the game development industry. He came to the government seeking the best way he could have a big impact and do big good.
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cloud.gov is full steam ahead on its FedRAMP assessment process
on July 18, 2016
Here at 18F on the cloud.gov team, we’re working toward getting cloud.gov assessed as FedRAMP compliant, with lots of interesting progress — so here’s an update, including our FedRAMP Ready status!
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Compliance Masonry: Building a risk management platform, brick by brick
on April 15, 2016
We’re trying to change how we approach the development of system security plans. Our goal is to create a system that allows system custodians, security operations staff, and executives to actively interact, update, and generate assurance reports with searchable content and testable security controls to satisfy any type of risk management framework. The current prototype is called Compliance Masonry.
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How we share a visual style across multiple sites
on March 30, 2016
In developing a redesign for cloud.gov, we needed a technical solution to coding the visual style that would scale to multiple sites with separate codebases without requiring us to copy code. Our solution is our “shared style library”, a library of CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts that can be distributed to multiple codebases to create a shared visual style.
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Answering common questions about cloud.gov
on November 13, 2015
Four weeks ago, we announced cloud.gov, a new platform that will enable small federal teams to rapidly develop and deploy web services with best-practice, production-level security and scalability. Currently, we’re running a small pilot program to prepare to open up cloud.gov to all federal agencies. In the meantime, we’d like to lay out some more details about the project and answer some common questions.
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To always be shipping, you need a shipyard
on October 9, 2015
We’ve developed cloud.gov, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), to tackle core infrastructure issues and enable our small development teams to improve the delivery of 18F products.
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Avoiding cloudfall: A systematic approach to cloud migration
on June 22, 2015
18F has been working on reducing the costs of entry to the cloud and thinking about good practices for cloud migration. One good practice is to adopt a scaled approach to cloud migration to avoid cloudfall.
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Layering innovation
on May 8, 2015
At 18F, we're changing the way government thinks about software, all the way to provisioning and deployment. To do that, we implemented an open source platform as a service for our developers. Here’s a look at how we created it.
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