The Civil Aviation Authority achieves a “perfect” migration from GOV.UK PaaS to Microsoft Azure

“This was one of the smoothest and most straightforward migration projects that we’ve had in a while. When you’ve got something as business critical as this and it has to run pretty much without interruption, as this transition did, that’s important,” states Matt Taylor, Chief Information Officer at the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority. “The migration from GOV.UK PaaS to Microsoft Azure tracked almost exactly to the schedule we set out – both in terms of budget and timescales. It was perfect.”  
 

The drone and model aircraft registration and education service

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is a Public Corporation of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) which oversees and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the United Kingdom, including remotely piloted craft. 
 

In December 2018, the sighting of two drones at Gatwick airport caused the airport to be closed for 33 hours. More than 1,000 flights were cancelled, with more than 140,000 passengers affected. In response, the UK Government tightened the regulations around drone registration. The CAA was tasked with establishing a process for delivering education to remote pilots on how to fly safely and adhere to the rules of the sky and to create a registry of aircraft and operators.  
 

In response, the CAA established its drone and model aircraft registration and education service (DMARES). The project was funded by DfT and the Government Digital Service (GDS) stipulated that DMARES should sit on the UK Government Platform as a Service cloud hosting (GOV.UK PaaS). 
 

Today, more than 500,000 active users are registered on the DMARES platform, including some 6,000 young flyers under 13 who benefit from education and parent/guardian information and STEM outreach. 
 

A burning platform

Three years after DMARES went live, the UK Government announced that it was decommissioning GOV.UK PaaS. Although the DMARES service was the only CAA workload on GOV.UK PaaS, the CAA knew it needed to act swiftly. 
 

“The deadline is a relatively hard endpoint from the GOV.UK PaaS team,” says Matt Taylor. “We recognised that there are a lot of other organisations that would be affected and we didn’t want to be competing for the GOV.UK PaaS team’s time when we tried to do the migration.” 
 

With the platform due to be decommissioned in December 2023 and a need to avoid the peak renewals period of November to February, the CAA had to get the migration completed by September 2023.  
 

Work began immediately to plan a stable migration path, led by Ewa Gowers, Product Manager in the CAA’s Safety & Airspace Risk Group (SARG), a member of the general aviation and remotely piloted aircraft team and manager of the DMARES application.
 

“Like any good product manager, I wanted to expand the DMARES service. However, in the past we couldn’t really do that because the existing system was effectively in a ‘black box’ on the government service. I wanted to get onto a more strategic platform anyway,” says Ewa Gowers. “The notification in July 2022 gave me the burning platform I needed to make the move.” 
 

Choosing Microsoft Azure

Although it might have seemed more natural to migrate onto the hyper-scaler cloud service which had been the underlying infrastructure for GOV.UK PaaS, this isn’t what the CAA chose to do. The CAA already used many Microsoft services. It convened with its Microsoft partner and some of the infrastructure experts at Microsoft to understand whether it would be possible to migrate DMARES to Microsoft Azure.

“We had other applications and portals running on Microsoft Azure,” explains Ewa Gowers, “and we favoured a Microsoft first approach because then we have one set of technologies for which to master, maintain and embed skills. Also, from a cost-effectiveness and ease of management perspective, standardising on a single technology makes sense.”  

Because it was the first migration of its kind, with Microsoft support, the CAA ran a seven-week discovery project in conjunction with Microsoft and CAA’s Microsoft partner to understand the art of the possible. It explored the time, cost and effort to migrate over to Azure and defined the technical architecture, the migration path, the landing zone and the team required. In addition, the CAA needed to ensure any platform could mirror the government’s strong security protocols.  
 

“Customer experience is another key driver. Ideally, we want a single, connected view of the customer so they have one login with us. It makes logical sense to align systems to achieve that seamless experience,” explains Ewa Gowers. “It all adds up to a desire to choose one platform and do it well. For us, that platform is Microsoft Azure.”

A “perfect” migration

The contract was signed in November 2022 and work began in earnest to complete the migration. The CAA needed to avoid its busy renewal periods in November and February, which set the timeline for the work to build the infrastructure, run technical testing, trials and UAT.  
 

“It all went very smoothly and to plan,” reports Ewa Gowers. “We allowed eight hours of downtime that we informed customers about but we actually completed the migration of 5.2 million records in two hours without a hitch. It was a lot easier than my expectations. It was swift. It was good.” 
 

The migration completed successfully in March 2023. 
 

“It’s not the default that you set out with a budget and a plan and it all gets delivered – particularly with a migration project,” says Matt Taylor. “When there’s large amounts of data like this, there’s usually something that gives you a bit of a headache. It’s not just the application that has to move, of course, it’s the pipeline to deploy and the infrastructure around things like security monitoring. But this went perfectly.” 
 

A flight path to success  

The CAA team credits the hard work that went into planning the project, the excellent communication between partners and the detailed, collaborative testing for the smooth migration. 
 

“The highly skilled resources of the Microsoft partner and the fantastic collaboration between teams helped our success,” says Ewa Gowers. “Microsoft assisted us with architectural best practice. We had a good plan. We did lots of testing and trials upfront. During the testing phases we did encounter problems but we resolved all those so on the day it went well.” 
 

In particular, the live scheduled testing conducted over Microsoft Teams proved critical. Ewa Gowers says, “We had live testing sessions with the GOV.UK PaaS team collaboratively over a Teams call and that collaboration and teamwork allowed for speedy and swift troubleshooting.” 
 

Matt Taylor agrees, “We tested it really carefully and thoroughly and the transition cut-over plan was really concrete – as was proven. It’s gone really well. We’re pleased with Microsoft support, pleased with our partners and pleased with how the project went.”
 

A new, proven migration path for GOV.UK PaaS users

“We’d recommend this route. There is no reason why you can’t move from GOV.UK PaaS onto Microsoft Azure… There’s a templated approach now.” says Ewa Gowers. 
 

The DMARES application has been running on Microsoft Azure for six weeks and users have not noticed a difference – “Which was the point, right?” prompts Ewa Gowers.
 

The CAA can already see the benefits of choosing Azure. One immediate benefit has been in simplifying the estate. “We used to have around ten third-party tools because the government platform didn’t have them natively,” recalls Ewa Gowers. “We were paying individual subscriptions for those services. Now, we’ve been able to take advantage of the native functionality in Azure to decommission some of those services, so there will be an overall cost benefit. We’re no longer paying those subscriptions, and there’s a contract overhead saving too because we’re no longer having to administer those different subscriptions and payment processes.”

A single pane of glass for management and security 

As well as benefitting from Azure native tooling, the migration to Azure has security advantages too. The CAA already uses Microsoft Sentinel to monitor some workloads, now it can bring its largest application under the same controls. 
 

“A single pane of glass is really important to us,” says Matt Taylor. “We’ve been maturing our information security, particularly our detect and respond and SOC capabilities. Bringing that together gave us some cost benefits, but it is also more effective if we can see it all in one place.” 
 

“One of the threat actors we’re concerned with is a state actor targeting aviation. Understanding when they’re doing a coordinated action against multiple organisations can be difficult enough. We didn’t want that exacerbated by us having difficulty seeing what was happening across multiple of our systems. Microsoft Sentinel across the whole estate is always going to be helpful.” 
 

In the right place to benefit from the latest tech  

Although the deadline for the decommissioning of GOV.UK PaaS forced CAA into a lift-and-shift approach to the DMARES migration, the move to Azure opens the door to develop the application in the future to utilise more cloud-native technologies and approaches. The CAA hopes to adopt a containerised, microservices approach based on Azure Kubernetes (AKS).  
 

“Architecturally, Azure Kubernetes is the way we want to go,” advises Matt Taylor. “That’s the future and it will give us cost benefits too.” 
 

This redevelopment of the application will particularly benefit the CAA’s commercial operations. 
 

“The oversight of drones is something that all national aviation authorities need to do and not every nation has got there yet,” explains Matt Taylor. “A subsidiary part of the CAA offers consultancy and solutions to other aviation authorities around the world. Moving DMARES onto Azure actually helps that team; it makes it much more attractive as a sellable option because other countries couldn’t use GOV.UK PaaS. With a containerised approach in the future, it will be even more straightforward to deploy elsewhere.” 
 

Azure is the strategic platform the business wanted

Moving to Azure offers more than industry leading native tooling and the potential to use the latest technologies. Uniquely, it offers tight integration with the rest of the Microsoft product suite – offering further economies of scale and seamless experiences. 
 

The CAA has now begun work to move a second, legacy platform which managed the “specific” category of drone users onto the DMARES platform. It will use the same Microsoft Azure infrastructure for the frontend and integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing and Customer Insights for the backend functionality.  
 

Ewa Gowers explains, “Because customer relationship management is more complex in the specific category, we needed to introduce backend functionality that is more fit for purpose and feature rich, which Dynamics 365 gives us. Bringing the systems together will create a better experience for the customer, introducing automation and avoiding multiple touchpoints and verification steps, so it feels much more seamless. It’s another step towards the CAA having a single view of the customer.” 
 

This time, the legacy application will be redeveloped as part of the migration process, leveraging Azure Kubernetes to create a futureproof solution. 
 

Matt Taylor concludes, “Moving to Microsoft Azure means we can be more strategic with our inhouse skills and resources… We’re increasingly confident that Microsoft is the right place to stay.”