Kainos and the FCDO

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) is the UK Department that pursues our national interests and projects the UK as a force for good in the world. The FCDO promotes the interests of British citizens, safeguards the UK's security, defends the UK's values, reduces poverty and tackles global challenges with the UK's international partners.

The Managed Services unit of Kainos has worked with the FCDO Consular Services since 2014, helping to support and maintain many digital Consular services that provide global support to British nationals across the world. Alongside support and maintenance of many existing digital services, the FCDO required a managed service and delivery partner to run and optimise their service including Emergency Travel Document (ETD) and Consular Hubs.

The FCDO need a broad range of technical skills to support its public-facing live digital services, including some of the staff-facing systems that support the services: 

• Second and third line 24/7 service support (First line support is provided by the FCDO), maintenance and continuous improvement of services
• Consolidated Support services with increases in efficiencies and a reduction in operational overheads assigned to specific products and services as part of a Consular ‘One Team’ providing:
  • Public-facing digital services and AWS Technical support.
  • Two staff-facing systems linked to the Emergency Travel Document (ETD) service (ETD Central and the ‘Consular Integration Service (‘CIS’))

• The FCDO ETD release cycle was long and involved extended downtime windows

• The FCDO Consular Hubs existing CI/CD Pipeline lacked automation

Several of the FCDO Services (including Consular Hubs) were migrated to AWS in line with the following design principles:  

• AWS PaaS services were preferred where possible resulting in the; 

• Replacement of PostgreSQL with AWS Aurora RDS 
• Replacement of RabbitMQ with Amazon MQ  
• Replacement of Mongo DB with AWS DocumentDB 

• AWS Elastic Container Service were preferred over AWS EC2 instances  
• All services were deployed across multiple availability zones for high availability 

The solution spanned many of our capabilities and was multi-disciplinary.  

• Provision of on-call engineers 24/7/365 with a broad range of technical skills 
• Fully ISO20000-aligned Service Management 

• Full delegated public cloud platform management 
• Continuous delivery with no-downtime releases  
• Implementing medium-to-large-scale development projects 

Kainos delivered support in the following key areas: 

Regular Support & Maintenance 

• Diligent execution and monitoring of recurring software updates 
• Immediate mitigation of any critical vulnerabilities 
• 24/7/365 automated alerting with full integration with service logging, monitoring, and analytics for up-to-the-minute service health was deployed from our library of exemplar code using AWS Cloudwatch, CloudFront and AWS SNS for alerts. 

Flexible Continuous Service Improvements and changes 

• Across the FCDO technical landscape and in real-time 
• Working in blended teams with the FCDO staff, other suppliers, and contractors 
• Replacing the existing CI/CD Pipeline with  a fully integrated solution using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild.  

Incident Management  

• Prompt response/correction of any defects 
• Pragmatic/systematic approach to problem-solving of service restoration  
• Use of all public cloud logging services to aid diagnosis 
• Clear & concise communications 

The partnership between Kainos and the FCDO ensures: 

• Increased operational efficiencies and a reduction in dependencies and operational overheads 
• Optimum collaboration across the FCDO’s multi-supplier landscape through embedding an Agile best practice methodology while advising the FCDO on Consular priorities 
• The FCDO’s digital services maintain compliance against the ‘Government Services Standards’ and the ‘Technology Code of Practice' 

Benefits and outcomes

The Emergency Travel Documents (ETD) service handles around 30,000 applications from British nationals abroad each year. All of the FCDO services have benefitted from the Kainos Managed Service support and maintenance and we’ve specifically ensured that the ETD solution is robust, secure, stable, available, up-to-date, and focused on user needs. 

Also, our support for the Crisis Hub is internally faced and used by the FCDO's staff to manage global crises such as natural disasters, large-scale disruption to travel, and political instability. 

• By leveraging AWS PaaS services  where possible we have: 
• Minimised the time and effort required to maintain the services delivering  >99% uptime through a scalable multi-AWS Availability Zone design 
• Reduced complexity and with a 50% reduction in hosting and support costs 
• Enabled and supported the FCDO to migrate its portfolio to AWS in line with the UK government's cloud-first strategy 
• Strong partnership strengthened with the FCDO with additional migration projects planned 
• As part of our 24/7/365 automated alerting service, we provisioned a centralised monitoring solution using AWS CloudWatch that delivered application focussed insight enabling immediate availability and reliability improvements  
• The creation of a new CI/CD Pipeline enabled us to fully automate the: 
• Application build, test and release lifecycle enabling us to complete safe releases to production in a matter of minutes when compared with the historic 2-3 hours maintenance window.  
• Creation of all AWS resources and services using bespoke Terraform Code 
• Our diligent execution and monitoring of recurring software updates with prompt defect correction response ensures that the FCDO high-priority incident Service Level Agreements are met 
• The FCDO user interfacing service portfolio managed by Kainos has expanded from 4 to 19 services within the last 3 years