What is the Defra Azure Development Platform (ADP)?¶

The AzureDevelopment Platform is a modern 'PaaS' service designed for delivery teams to design, build, run, and observe container-first Cloud Native business applications and intelligent apps. It supports microservices-based architectures and enforces approved Defra engineering standards. It can host and run any containerised Web App or API, and promotes a highly scalable, self-service, developer-centric approach to digital delivery.

Why is it important?¶

Alignment & Compliance¶

Your delivery will be aligned and compliant with delivery standards on day 1.

The ADP will help you align with Development & Delivery standards from day 1. The Platform provides everything you need to build business apps in a compliant manner, from architecture to development, security to quality assurance.

Focus on business value¶

You build the Apps – We build the Infra.

The ADP is self-service and features highly automated processes which dev teams won’t need to worry about. As all your infrastructure and team setup is automated, from backlogs to the apps you build, development teams can focus on delivering the business value features.

Autonomy & Empowerment¶

Your teams will be autonomous andempowered to deliver business value.

Developers will have all the tools they need on day 1. Interactions with the Platform are centralised, and there is no requirement for ticketing tools for deployments or configuration. If you need to create a new business app, you simply access the ADP and self-service from the Portal catalogue.

Team efficiency performance¶

Your teams will have full observability & DORA metrics to continuously improve.

A key goal of the ADP is to fully integrate the ecosystem of approved tools efficiently and coherently. With a fully automated and integrated Platform, development teams will be able to both measure and improve upon their change lead time, deployment frequencies and failure rates.

What does ADP offer me?¶

ADP is a set of self-service tools, services and processes that supports and accelerates your software development, while taking care of managing the underlying infrastructure. Our vision is: "Build Apps, Not Infra".

Multiple 'exemplar' & 'Hello Worl' development templates (APIs & User Interfaces)
Fully preconfigured CI & CD Pipelines for Infrastructure & Applications, enforcing a modern Git-Ops approach & container scanning
A full suite of deployed environments – from development to production
A self-service developer portal that centralises information about your entire app estate – and enables self-service deployments of new services
A full suite of observability and monitoring tools, including dashboards – from dev to production environments
Multiple application container hosting options: Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Container Apps and Azure Functions as well as Azure Open AI integration.
Full support for NodeJS and C#/.NET Applications for frontends & backend
Automated pipelines include a full testing suite, covering security tests, static code analysis, integration, accessibility, unit, acceptance, contract, and performance tests.
Automated setup of Azure DevOps integrations, (where required) including Boards, Backlogs, Work Items, CI/CD and integration with GitHub for code repositories.
Support for a wide range of infrastructure, including Storage, Load Balancing, Web App Firewalls & Bot protection, CDN, SQL & NoSQL Databases, Caching, API Management, private networking, flexible container hosting options.
Enforces a secure by design approach with low/zero trust policies

ADP Tools Landscape¶

ADP Tools Landscape