“A new platform lets development teams focus on applications and leaves the back end work to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Information and Technology (OI&T).”
“Veterans Affairs Platform One (VAPO) is an enterprise-class hosting service that containerizes applications, allowing developers to provision environments as needed using infrastructure-as-code (IAC). The containers have templated, pre-approved features built in, including security controls. That speeds authority to operate reviews, and the overall platform cuts time off application deployment cycles.”
“’At core, it’s a shift to help application teams focus on their applications, and we help with the back-end integration to the underlying infrastructure resources from those technology domains,’ said Kendall Krebs, senior technical adviser for infrastructure operations in VA OI&T’s DevSecOps organization and a senior sponsor on the VAPO effort. ‘Essentially, make the software-delivery process easier on the software team so they focus on the code.'”
“Application teams that want to shift to VAPO just have to ask the VAPO team, which reviews the application and then helps stand up the environment. ‘A long-term goal is to have preconfigured environments that we just need to make slight modifications on,’ Krebs said. So far, three environments are queued up for production, three are in the proof-of-concept phase, and five are in research and discovery.”
“VAPO is part of VA’s IT Hosting Modernization effort. The department has about 100 applications, Krebs said…”
“Looking ahead, the VAPO team has its eye on cloud-native solutions. ‘VA Platform One was designed to work both in the cloud and in traditional data centers,’ Krebs said. ‘As we go forward, we’re going to be looking closely at some of those cloud-native solutions that are out there or potentially using some of the integrated solutions with the cloud providers as part of our solution set…'” Read the full article here.
Source: Veterans Affairs Platform One speeds cloud app development – By Stephanie Kanowitz, November 3, 2021. GCN.
