Department
Platforms and Engineering
Builds and operates the shared platforms public services run on — Notify, Pay, and Hosting — and is accountable for their availability.
What this directorate does
Platforms and Engineering runs the components every public service needs and no department should build twice. Commonwealth Notify sends the letters, emails, and text messages that services depend on. Commonwealth Pay takes payments. Commonwealth Hosting runs the services themselves.
The directorate publishes its availability commitments and its actual performance against them, and operates the incident process behind the service status page. When a platform fails, it is this directorate that says so, and when.
Responsibilities
- Operating Commonwealth Notify, Pay, and Hosting
- Publishing availability commitments and performance against them
- Running the platform incident and communications process
- Reviewing and approving departmental platform onboarding
- Maintaining the Office's open source engineering libraries
Services run by this directorate
Commonwealth Notify
Send emails, text messages, and printed letters from your service without building or contracting your own messaging system.
Commonwealth Pay
Take card and bank payments in a public service, with refunds, reconciliation, and reporting handled for you.
Commonwealth Hosting
Run a public service on shared, monitored infrastructure that already meets the Commonwealth's security and availability requirements.
Guidance maintained by this directorate
Using the Commonwealth Design System
The components, patterns, and styles Commonwealth services share, and when it is right to build something that is not in the system.
Integrating with Commonwealth ID
How to add Commonwealth ID sign-in to a public service, which assurance level to ask for, and what your service must not do with an identity.