As recently disclosed in the Autumn Statement, Land Registry has confirmed it will stay in the public sector, where it believes a new, updated system will best be developed.
Land Registry advises that a large component of this is the new common technology platform. Designed to benefit conveyancers and solicitors, home buyers and sellers as well as the wider UK economy, the platform will provide a launchpad for a range of services.
The technology enables the IT infrastructure to be improved easily and quickly by their in-house team. Upgrading the reliability of the current systems forms part of their broader plan to replace them over the next five years. This aims to improve access to the Registry’s services, data as well as the property titles for customers, government partners and the public at large.
The digitisation of the Land Registry service should therefore mean the conveyancing process is made faster and smoother for anyone involved in the purchasing or selling of a property.
It also means the new services can be developed quickly and tailored toward the needs of a user at an affordable cost.
Construction
The platform is grounded on a combination of internal modular hyper-converged systems and cloud-based systems using innovative technology.
When creating the new infrastructure, the Registry intended to move from a manual process to a more automated solution. Instead of creating and deploying applications by hand, the digitisation would decrease the need for human intervention and allow changes to be made more quickly and easily.
To enable this, infrastructure was treated as software, building, managing and provisioning all infrastructure as code using Open Source toolsets.
Agile development processes were adopted by the engineers to ensure the benefits of using infrastructure as code. This formed a pipeline that enabled any changes to infrastructure to be created, deployed and tested right through to production, in all environments. Creating infrastructure using this process meant that entire working application settings and virtual server space could be built in a short space of time. As well as accelerating the speed at which infrastructure was provisioned, environments were also made more reliable.
The new platform has also meant that the Registry’s engineers have broadened their knowledge and expertise, having worked with new technology. Along with assisting staff in developing their own skills, ideas and way of working, the infrastructure has now increased its responsive capabilities in respect of new progress demands.
Delivery
As well as application delivery speed quickening, applications are now being deployed on a multiple basis. This is done daily through automated application and infrastructure test suites, allowing more qualitative real-time developer and citizen feedback to be submitted.
Development stages infrastructure can be destroyed or spun using the Government Digital Service, depending on requirement. Lower environments are hosted in the platform’s public cloud area and are fully automated.
At this level, demand and capacity can be managed quickly and allow developers to work more flexibly from the network, as well as connecting to their environments.
Over 67 micro-digital service applications have been delivered on more than 150 managed servers; created and maintained using infrastructure as code, through the utilisation of the platform. To date, 9,819 servers have been provisioned and destroyed to deploy automated infrastructure testing, processes which could not have been possible on traditional platforms. This has allowed developers to put their applications and services in front of users at an earlier point. In turn, user needs are able to be acknowledged and taken into consideration during the product development process, meaning new services can be tailored to specific needs.
