Speed Your Agency’s Software Deployments in 6 Easy Steps

Posted on by Jim Dodson

Slow, bottlenecked, and often archaic release methods challenge most government agency software delivery teams. But enterprise feature management can help your agency achieve faster releases with less risk.

Enterprise feature management provides teams with total control over application features, fine-grain release targeting, and detailed audit logs. It starts with feature flags, a powerful tool that allows your development teams to turn features on or off without requiring a code change or deployment. They are a modern solution to traditional hard-coded boolean flags custom-built for each app. With an enterprise feature management platform, you can use a pre-set feature flag enterprise framework to define and operate a simple and seamless experience. This delivers a host of benefits that, among others, dramatically streamlines and accelerates software delivery. It also empowers teams to roll out new functionality gradually and selectively rather than all at once. And, your agency can “dark launch” a feature in production, reducing dependencies on expensive and custom staging environments.

Here are six steps that government agencies can take to get started with LaunchDarkly Federal, the only FedRAMP-authorized feature management platform. These steps will help you understand how to use feature management for high-speed, low-risk software releases of legacy and new applications:

1. Put in place the LaunchDarkly SDK to enable feature flagging

LaunchDarkly’s Software Development Kits (SDKs) allow your developers to implement and share feature flags quickly and easily across software applications. They provide an easy way to connect new and existing applications to the LaunchDarkly SaaS platform. Simply include your programming language-specific LaunchDarkly SDK into your application to get started. The SDK initializes to a specific environment, manages default values and targeting contexts, handles any connectivity issues, and listens for feature status and rule changes. SDKs provide the support for real-time application updates without the need to deploy new code.

2. Identify your environment(s)

In traditional release motions, government agencies identify and set up numerous development, testing, and production environments. Not only is each environment often expensive, but running a release through so many gates can be a significant challenge for resource-strapped teams. It is almost impossible to simulate a production level environment in staging and so when you release to production, you are testing in production anyways. Why not do it safely with granular targeting to reduce risk? With an enterprise feature management solution, you can reduce the number of environments and focus more on safely and securely testing in production.

3. Target, or even micro-target, your release

The next step is determining exactly where you will release individual features, and when. With feature flags, your development teams can release features in a highly customized way. By creating targeting rules, teams can easily target individual releases to a subset of users, resources, or even infrastructure, before making them widely available to all end-users. It’s possible to even micro-target a single user.

Targeting makes it simple to progressively release a new feature to a QA team or to project sponsors for feedback. The granular control over features and release targeting that LaunchDarkly Federal provides will enable more control than traditional blue/green deployments alone.

4. Flip a switch, and release whenever you want

With enterprise feature management, your development teams can separate deployment and release processes. Engineering teams can deploy code, and non-engineering teams can trigger the release with a simple flip of the switch. Decoupling these processes reduces the risk of failure and allows teams to release new features quickly and efficiently. Your development teams can keep progressing on their software development projects and release new features at the best time for their program or department. And, enterprise feature management also allows your project and program teams to develop, test, and deploy features using custom workflows with enterprise-level management capabilities.

By using low-risk continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) development processes with incident resolution times of less than 200ms, teams can improve developer productivity and reduce the time it takes to release new features to production.

5. Quickly disable features if issues or errors occur

In the event of an issue or error, teams need to be able to quickly disable features to avoid any issues affecting the application in production. Issues could range from something major such as security vulnerabilities to minor usability and cosmetic problems. With traditional processes, a team would have to roll back to a previous release losing everything they just deployed or take down an entire application to address issues or errors. However, with enterprise feature management solutions, teams can quickly disable the individual problematic feature leaving the rest of the application unchanged. Instead of the lengthy and cumbersome rollback and redeployment processes, this limits the impact to the application with zero downtime. DevSecOps teams would then typically perform a “patch forward” for the fix.

6. Track the release with detailed analytics

Using analytics, monitoring tools, and processes helps guarantee that your software meets government guidelines and agency policies. Using enterprise feature management, your agency can gather detailed audit logs and analytics to inform your decision-making and improve software delivery processes across your mission-critical programs.

Following these six simple steps can help you shrink your agency’s release time from years and months, to days and hours, just like it did for the Centers for Medicare (CMS). Using LaunchDarkly and the six steps above, CMS went from one launch once per quarter, to completing six launches within a single day to support a global rollout.

Feature management is a powerful DevSecOps tool that can truly accelerate the delivery of transformative software. With detailed control over features, release targeting, and detailed audit logs, your agency can reduce risk and deliver software at the speed of the commercial world.

Download our eBook to learn more about LaunchDarkly, and view our our public sector webinar to learn more about DevSecOps best practices.

Safely Modernize Legacy Systems with Palantir Foundry Container Engine (FCE)

Posted on by Madeline Zimmerman

Missile warnings. Airplane flight statuses. Satellite observation alerts. Much of the U.S. Government’s most critical digital infrastructure is dependent on software built during the Cold War, written in archaic languages (e.g., Fortran, COBOL, ADA), and/or installed exclusively on mainframe computers. While the infrastructure is old and may struggle to keep up with the needs of today, the core logic often works well. Yet re-writing decades of work and millions of lines of code to try to modernize just isn’t feasible.

Introducing Foundry Container Engine (FCE): FCE runs containerized legacy code in Foundry, enabling government agencies to leverage what’s working and safely leave behind what isn’t. For an analogy, consider AWS Lambda, which revolutionized how engineers run code by abstracting away the hardware infrastructure required — no more worrying about servers and clusters. In a similar fashion, FCE is revolutionizing how engineers integrate and orchestrate legacy investments in their modern software architectures. FCE streamlines your modernization journey, allowing you to incrementally rebuild millions of lines of legacy code while continuously delivering new value to the organization.

The Challenge: Operationalizing legacy code is hard

Code that is decades old is not inherently bad. On the contrary, it’s been battle-tested over decades and written by people with deep expertise in highly specialized fields. Yet aligning old software to the changing operational realities of today is both daunting and necessary. It’s often untenable work to re-write and scale up the satellite model that was built to detect 100 satellites in the 1980s and now needs to detect 30,000 satellites in 2023.

Our customers who rely on legacy code and infrastructure frequently face the following challenges:

Modernizing is disruptive: Too often, the only options presented for modernization are highly disruptive — data lakes, code base overhauls, and multi-year roadmaps. These run the risk of taking critical systems offline without ever accomplishing the necessary operational outcomes.
Unscalable: There is a long lead time for up-sizing environments to meet computation requirements, and scaling replicas of instances of products is often impossible. Forget about doing this in real-time to meet today’s critical deadlines.
Siloed logic: Sophisticated legacy models are much more valuable when integrated with other data sources. In our satellite example, this might include observation data, surveillance networks, sensors, and more. Adding new data feeds, data processes, outputs, and interfaces is unfeasible or too slow to be valuable.
Closed ecosystem: The data pipelines associated with legacy code are often a black box. There is no way for other platform and development teams to securely collaborate, effectively limiting upside by restricting the number of people able to interact with the code and provide novel analyses.
Divorced from operational decisions: Legacy models produce compelling insights, but the outputs are not actionable. There is no easy way to automatically create an intuitive visualization or useful alerting logic. A collision model might show satellites are about to collide, but users cannot action this information to re-orient where those satellites are flying.

Solution: Use FCE to lift and shift logic to Foundry and make it 100x more valuable

As a centrally-managed, cloud-based SaaS platform, Foundry offers instant access to cutting edge modern software implementation, including streaming pipelines, live API-driven inference, and autoscaling. Now that FCE allows containerized code to run in Foundry, unlocking the full value of legacy systems has never been easier.

Day 1 benefits include:

Safely and incrementally modernize: Immediately start your modernization journey with the assurance that critical systems will continue to function, and deprecation of old components will do no harm.
Rapidly scalable infrastructure: Achieve on-demand expansion of your compute and storage environment as capabilities evolve and expand. This provides resiliency and redundancy to avoid a single point of failure. Replacing one file with another in the FAA’s flight software should not cause flights to be grounded nationwide.
Flexibility and interoperability: Seamless addition of future data feeds, data processes, objects, schemas, and interfaces. Fuse disparate data to quickly produce new analyses.
Secure collaboration: Built-in security access control features enable secure collaboration among combined platform and development teams. When combined with pipeline transparency and DevSecOps iteration, customers can securely democratize outputs over open, extensible APIs.
Modern and dynamic user interfaces for rapid and automated decision-making: Users easily configure alerting logic and produce new applications with low-code/no-code tooling. Translate the complex output of a satellite physics model into an operationally relevant Space Domain Awareness application.

In a silo, legacy software can still be improved, but those small gains come at the expense of the significant, compounding benefits of modernization. FCE enables agencies to rapidly speed up progress towards their software-driven outcomes by integrating anything run by FCE with other Foundry products (e.g., pipeline builder, streaming, workshop). With Foundry’s core principles of modularity and interoperability, agencies can selectively deprecate legacy software components without disrupting their data sources, ontology, and actions. In a world where the missiles are parabolic one month and hypersonic the next, innovation in bits must outpace innovation in atoms.

This post originally appeared on Palantir.com and is re-published with permission.

Download our Resource, “Impact Study: Accelerating Interoperability with Palantir Foundry” to learn more about how Palantir Technologies can support your organization.

Sea-Air-Space 2023 Showcases Strategic Insights for the Navy

Posted on by Francis Rose

As the landscape of defense technology across the United States Armed Forces continues to advance and transform, the military must also evolve and adapt with it. At Sea-Air-Space 2023, the Navy League’s Global Maritime Exposition, key leadership from the U.S. defense industry and government technology experts came together for educational and collaborative sessions across a variety of topics. A record number of attendees gathered for the three-day conference where many vendors including Carahsoft and 45 of its partners demonstrated their technology solutions to meet military needs. Fed Gov Today joined Carahsoft on the show floor to speak with military thought leaders on staffing, cybersecurity and more.

Sea Service chiefs attending the conference noted that currently, maintaining and developing the workforce is a high priority for the military as it emphasizes the role of people as resources. Defense agencies are looking to engage young, talented individuals interested in serving the armed forces.

“Whenever you see the defense budget start to go down…a lot of times you’ll see training and education reduced,” Carahsoft’s Program Executive of Navy and Defense Strategy, Mike McCalip, said. “What you end up with is a workforce that can be five or 10 years behind in technology.” To mitigate this, McCalip sees this as an opportunity for industry vendors to “help [the Navy] to educate and keep their workforce on the tip of the spear when it comes to technology.”

Another important concept discussed at Sea-Air-Space was the Department of Defense’s shift to ever evolving Zero Trust. Throughout the conference, Sea Service chiefs and tech vendors fielded many questions and conversations surrounding cybersecurity’s role within defense strategy. Military leaders and vendors shared an eagerness to collaborate and explore opportunities for growth together in the future.

Check out the rest of my industry insights and highlights from the event floor at Sea-Air-Space 2023 in my full blog at FedGovToday.com.

Shaping the Future With 3D Software in Government

Posted on by Gary Reburn

Over the past few years, the use of 3D software has become increasingly important in Government Agencies. With advances in technology, government officials are turning to 3D software to help them visualize, analyze, and design projects with greater efficiency and effectiveness. This technology can provide several benefits, including improved collaboration, better decision-making, and increased efficiency.

One of the most significant benefits of 3D software is the ability to create realistic visualizations of data and designs. This is particularly useful in areas such as architecture, urban planning, and transportation. By using 3D software, government agencies can create realistic models of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, allowing stakeholders to see how designs will look in the real world. This can help to identify potential issues early in the planning process, leading to more efficient and cost-effective solutions.

For example, a city planning department could use 3D software to create a digital model of a new highway interchange. The model could be used to identify potential traffic bottlenecks, analyze the impact on nearby neighborhoods, and make design modifications to optimize traffic flow and minimize the impact on the community. By using 3D software, the planning department can gain valuable insights into the project and make better decisions that benefit both the city and its residents.

Another benefit of 3D software is improved collaboration. By creating 3D models of designs and data, government agencies can share information more easily and effectively with stakeholders. This can lead to better communication and a greater understanding of the issues at hand. Additionally, 3D software allows multiple stakeholders to view and interact with the same model, allowing for more efficient collaboration and problem-solving.

For instance, a team of engineers and architects working on a public works project could use 3D software to create a digital model of the project. The model could be shared with all team members, allowing them to see and interact with the same information. This would facilitate better communication and collaboration, as team members could identify potential issues and make design modifications in real time.

3D software can also improve decision-making in government agencies. By visualizing data and designs in 3D, agencies can better understand complex systems and identify potential problems before they occur. This can help agencies to make more informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes. Additionally, 3D software can help agencies to evaluate the impact of different policy decisions, allowing for more effective planning and resource allocation.

For example, a state transportation department could use 3D software to evaluate the impact of a proposed toll increase on highway usage. The department could create a 3D model of the highway system and use data analytics to simulate different traffic scenarios. This would allow them to evaluate the impact of the proposed toll increase and make more informed decisions about transportation policy.

Finally, 3D software can increase efficiency in government agencies. By using 3D software to create models and visualizations, agencies can streamline their workflows and reduce the time and resources required for planning and analysis. This can lead to faster decision-making and more effective use of resources.

For instance, a Federal agency could use 3D software to analyze satellite imagery of a natural disaster area. The software could automatically generate 3D models of the disaster area, allowing the agency to quickly assess the extent of the damage and prioritize response efforts. This would reduce the time required for manual analysis and allow the agency to more efficiently allocate resources.

In conclusion, the use of 3D software in government agencies can provide several benefits, including improved collaboration, better decision-making, and increased efficiency. As technology continues to advance, 3D software will likely become an increasingly important tool for government agencies across a range of fields.

If you or anyone you know would like to dive deeper into the Adobe creative applications and how they can be applied to current government projects, watch the on-demand recordings from our 8-part webinar series, Engage Audiences Across Screens with Powerful Collaboration and Creation.

Discover how Adobe Creative Cloud solutions accelerate creative workflows, allow for content creation across all screens and mediums, and enable quick and efficient creation of digital experiences. Our team of Adobe solutions experts demonstrate how to utilize the newest tools, upgrades, features, and integration capabilities that teams across all fields can leverage for compelling and exciting digital designs.

Okta and GovSlack Bring Digital-first Environment to Government

Posted on by Sean Frazier

Digital transformation is all around us. From how we shop to where we work, digital-first environments are the new normal. While the private sector quickly adopted collaborative, digital workspaces, the pace is a bit slower for government agencies – and for good reason.

Higher levels of security and compliance are required in government work, yet agencies still feel limited by the legacy systems in place. To transform into a digital-first workspace that promotes collaboration and improves communication among agencies and contractors, government agencies need flexible, inclusive technology that doesn’t sacrifice cybersecurity.

Modernize with a digital command center

Okta + GovSlack Digital-first Environment to Government Blog Embedded Image 2023

Okta integrates with GovSlack to help the government modernize how work gets done. The centralized digital headquarters provides frictionless, secure access and helps agencies increase productivity, security, governance, and end-to-end workflows.

GovSlack was launched to allow for secure collaboration. Okta’s Identity and access management (IAM) policies throughout GovSlack meet the security and compliance needs of intra- and cross-functional government teams and contractors.

Top five reasons to modernize with Okta and GovSlack

Here are some of the top reasons agencies can benefit from the Okta and GovSlack solutions:

Share information with external agencies and contractors in real time: Slack Connect allows agencies to extend the benefits of their centralized, digital workspace to both internal and external team members in real time. This helps reduce the need for meetings and follow-ups. Okta’s IAM capabilities throughout the platform remove siloed Identity security across the extended enterprise.
Access growing library of integrations: Okta’s secure and seamless integration with GovSlack and a growing number of high-security versions of the most commonly used business applications protect the government’s highest-value assets.
Meet strict compliance and security requirements: Okta’s FedRAMP Moderate Identity solution includes features and capabilities available throughout GovSlack that are designed to strengthen the security posture of government agencies. Okta’s trusted security capabilities meet Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA’s) Identity pillar, helping agencies bridge on-premises assets to the cloud with a unified and automated Identity-driven access layer.
Create a frictionless workforce experience: IAM tools from Okta, like phishing-resistant Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and biometrics, allow users to easily access the secure platform from any location or device. Granting permissions and access controls at scale is simple through GovSlack’s enterprise-grade admin dashboard.
Launch into the future of modern work: With security measures offered by Okta and GovSlack, agencies can incorporate a secure, cloud-based digital headquarters into all aspects of their daily work. With a secure digital workspace in place, agencies can reduce time spent building on-premises solutions, breaking down information silos, improving collaboration internally and externally, and opening the door to more possibilities when all stakeholders have access to the same workspace.

Download our Solution Brief to learn more about Okta, the federal Identity solution for high-impact applications, and GovSlack, the designated “digital headquarters” for many government agencies.

| Carahsoft

Category Archives: Federal Government