Case study

Maritime Coastguard Agency: Cloud Microservices Platform

The Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA), an executive agency of the Department for Transport, instructed Catapult to help them digitise the UK Ship Register (UKSR) services in alignment with the Government Digital Service Standards. They required high quality, scalable, digital services to which they can easily add new features and updates while mitigating the risk of outages. We utilised agile and DevOps delivery, implemented a cloud first strategy and built a Microservices Enablement Platform with a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach, powered by observability, to provide world-class services that meet the wide variety Ship Registry citizens' users needs. The service is increasing digital uptake and relieving the administrative burden on the Registrars, freeing up capacity to focus on achieving the MCA’s goals of increasing the UK flag's tonnage and number of registered vessels and gaining a global competitive advantage.

Image
Images of corporate awards badges
Image

The situation

The MCA is a highly customer focused organisation, and its overarching goal is to be the most successful international flag by 2022. One of their primary objectives to achieving this goal was to digitise the UK Ship Register and provide highly accessible, quality, GDS compliant, online services to their diverse client base. They knew they wanted to leverage the cloud and have an API-centric architecture, but had limited in-house engineering capability. This meant the solution needed to be easy to manage with a minimal learning curve for use. As part of their customer-centric approach, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency had set itself the target of delivering its first fully digital customer experience by 2020. To ensure they met this target they selected Catapult CX due to our proven track record of building systems across multiple industries using modern engineering practices.

The solution

Catapult proposed a cloud native microservices architecture, using APIs and events to communicate. Using infrastructure-as-code, we built a microservices platform (supporting both containers and functions - CaaS / FaaS), which the MCA could use to securely provide access to their data and run any new digital service they wanted to create for their customers. Powered by an observability solution integrated into the platform, we provided proactive alerting and dashboards to gain real-time insight into system health and the service performance. We defined a set of engineering and operational policies that provide guidance for the MCA and any of their vendors on how to run this platform and create new services for it. Along with the platform we delivered a secure CI/CI (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipeline which built, tested and deployed the services into the platform.

The results

Using this platform, we were able to deliver the first digital service for the MCA, namely the Small Ships Register, within 9 weeks. Over the following months additional microservices were deployed to the platform digitising the rest of the UKSR and Beacons services. Developers were able to use TDD (Test Driven Development) to build and deploy services written in any popular language, and use the NodeJS and Java sample projects to as a foundation to create a new service within minutes. The MCA were able to release at will, sometimes multiple times a day. They could respond to customer feedback within hours and even turn around any bugs raised on the same day.

Case Studies

    Automation drives reduction in software testing errors

    Catapult was engaged to help a multinational telecoms firm transform a large-scale telco stack (30-50 systems, 1500 developers, and 300 manual testers) from a traditional waterfall development model – where software testing is done at the end of the process – to a continuous delivery model. ...

    Read story
    Image

    Rapid IT Service Crisis Resolution

    When one of the world’s leading mobile network providers consolidated billing, customer and network management into a single unified system, chaos ensued. The new platform was so unstable that they were losing 243 trading hours per week. ...

    Read story
    Image

    Collaboration improves with Atlassian instance consolidation

    Zoopla is a UK property website and app that attracts over 40 million visitors per month. Over the years, the company has grown to be on of the biggest websites in the UK, enabling them to grow rapidly through numerous acquisitions. Whilst acquiring these digital companies such as, PSG, Alto, Jup ...

    Read story
    Image

    Digitalising the UKSR

    As part of the Maritime Coastguard Agency's goal to become the best performing and fastest growing international flag, they decided to digitalise the UK Ship Register to reduce internal administration and enhance the Customer Experience (CX). Catapult took an agile approach supported by Atlassian to ...

    Read story
    Image

    Digitalising the Beacon Register - Alpha

    The UK Maritime and Coastguard (MCA) enhanced emergency beacon registration and management. Automation, mobile-friendly service, and data validation improved user experience, cut costs by £300,000 annually, and enabled efficient search and rescue operations. ...

    Read story
    Image

    Atlassian Consolidation for Zoopla

    Zoopla, a major UK property website with 40M monthly visitors, excelled and expanded by acquiring companies like PSG, Alto, Jupix, MoveIt, all using Atlassian tools. To streamline collaboration, cut costs, and maintain efficiency, they sought to unify multiple Jira and Confluence instances. ...

    Read story
    Image

    Bringing DevOps and ITIL together at Harvey Nichols

    Harvey Nichols, a UK luxury department store chain, maintains exceptional customer experiences in-store and online. Focusing on aligning DevOps and ITIL, they aim to swiftly address customer inquiries and issues by harmonizing their development and operations teams, ensuring high IT standards for a ...

    Read story
    Image