back to article GDS builds UNICORN HERDER, plays with Puppets

The United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS) has built a Unicorn Herder, plays with puppets and is messing about with pretend (virtual) computers. The herder popped up on GitHub last week: it's a tool to manage daemonized unicorns. That's unicorns as in the HTTP server. GDS likes Unicorn and its related Gunicorn, but …

  1. Steve Button Silver badge

    The vcloud-tools suite, developed by GDS and available on github is excellent.

  2. batfastad

    rvm use build gem bundle install... ARRRGH!!!

    There is some good stuff in there, just a shame so much of it is wow, so hip, much Ruby, amaze! Nothing against the language. But from an operations point of view all my experiences of Ruby have been a complete pain in the backend. Probably different if you run Ubuntu Server Tepid Teabag etc in your enterprise though.

    Some more stuff here too https://github.com/alphagov but don't expect it to actually, well, work at all ever.

    1. Tom 38

      Re: rvm use build gem bundle install... ARRRGH!!!

      There is some good stuff.

      However, on some level I do wish they weren't spending money inventing the new ways to be cool. No-one's website fell over because it is hosted in httpd and not unicorn.

      1. Steven Raith

        Re: rvm use build gem bundle install... ARRRGH!!!

        Yeah, but you know what it's like - if they used something normal, they'd be ripped for not using something new and shiny....

        I used to work in DirectGov back when it was something new and shiny, and GDS is sort of doing similar work in terms of taking that general "stop fucking around and just make stuff that works" part of their ethos which seems so rare in government IT work, and it does pain me somewhat to see some pretty good people I have a lot of respect for get a kicking just because it makes a fun headline.

        Gov IT is an easy target, but in a lot of respects I don't think GDS really deserve much of the ire it gets given they're working within a government that has proven itself to be flat out incompetent when it come to tech - they seem to be one of the rare exceptions.

        Steven R

  3. jgumbley

    What's motivating this article?

    What is the news here? Industry started moving to widespread adoption of using virtual machines to drive down costs almost a decade ago - surely the Reg knows that and so why deride GDS for it?

    Very strange and unkind article.

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