"All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl." - Charlie Chaplin

Today Design Authority Governance will meet at Birchwood Park, brought to order by Mike R and attended by an array of fine looking projects poised to develop their next iteration. By bringing a bit of levity to the call (now also a LyncAV meeting) Mike makes the prospect of presenting architecture to a panel of peers a much less scary experience, but everyone attending realises how pivotal DA is. For the projects that are governed, it ensures a happy ending - so a comedy rather than a tragedy.

By the time a project makes it to Governance, almost every aspect of its technical structure has been laid down. The project is clear on what it's buying, what it's building and what it's reusing. Of these three complex activities, it's the reusing that's hardest IMHO.

There are fundamentally two types of reuse:
a) there's this other project right and they're doing a similar thing, so why don't they build a and then share it with you, and
b) we thought about this months ago, predicted the need, built a single shared service, identified where it would be hosted and who would run it in production.

Tech Lab's goal is to ensure that we do more of the latter and do it well. We're actively seeking out common components and building them out ahead of projects needing them. We're just getting started at this and have limited resource, so there's a long shopping list, but we're starting. We don't build them in an ivory tower, but right in the PDUs with the projects that are going to need them. Right now we're supporting IOS building the framework that will make it possible for projects to host in DWP public or private cloud (AWS or Crown hosting). It's complex stuff, but these are the building blocks that will enable projects to operate, monitor and scale, securely. That means that it has to pass security accreditation, IT health checks and the renown 'Wignall' test. It means that it has to work for 50-100 projects simultaneously, maybe more. It means that projects can start from a solid basis and, when presenting back to Design Authority, can focus on the differences, the bits that make them unique and ultimately valuable.