Hosting a modern justice system

How do you modernize a nation's justice system? The UK's Ministry of Justice shares its pragmatic platform strategy for balancing autonomy and security across 7,000 services.

#1about 3 minutes

Introduction to modernizing the justice system

The Ministry of Justice defines "modern" not as the newest technology but as the ongoing process of managing and improving its vast legacy of critical systems.

#2about 5 minutes

Managing a complex mix of old and new infrastructure

The hosting landscape includes thousands of services on Kubernetes, VMs, and on-premise servers, with a pragmatic cloud migration strategy focused on incremental improvements.

#3about 5 minutes

A centralized platform strategy to balance autonomy and control

The ideal architecture uses dedicated platforms for new services, data analytics, and legacy migration to provide consistency while empowering individual service teams.

#4about 3 minutes

Lesson 1: Why great platforms need internal marketing

A technically superior platform will fail without adoption, which requires early and continuous internal marketing to product, delivery, and finance stakeholders to secure buy-in.

#5about 2 minutes

Lesson 2: How platforms scale expertise and security

Centralized platforms enable a small expert team to implement improvements, like security patches, that benefit all services simultaneously, increasing efficiency and resilience.

#6about 3 minutes

Lesson 3: DevOps is a culture of empathy, not a role

True DevOps is a culture of empathy and knowledge sharing between developers and infrastructure engineers that requires deliberate investment in cross-training and collaboration.

#7about 1 minute

Resources for open government and technology careers

The Ministry of Justice operates in the open, with public code on GitHub, strategy blogs, and open job roles for those interested in their work.

#8about 12 minutes

Q&A on DevOps, government work, and career advice

The speaker answers audience questions about the scope of DevOps, the culture of maintaining legacy systems, career advice for women in tech, and the impact of government changes.