Police at the roadside: Making DVLA data available to the police via secure APIs.

DevOps

The Problem

When police officers stop individuals at the roadside, it's essential to verify the details they provide with the DVLA securely and remotely.

Much of the DVLA's data resides in legacy systems, making the migration of data to cloud-hosted storage imperative for project success.

Our Approach

We ensured a small, multidisciplinary team was in place to develop all project components promptly. Providing DevOps expertise allowed for rapid changes to infrastructure and software. Collaborating closely with the DVLA, we designed an ETL process to extract data from legacy systems and store it in read-only DynamoDB databases on AWS. We developed a lambda function to process this data into a format suitable for API consumption. Utilising CloudFormation, we deployed an API via AWS API Gateway and CloudFront.

The Results

Maintaining a small team with diverse skill sets facilitated rapid development. We upheld a high level of automation and testing, enabling swift progression of changes across environments. This enabled closer collaboration between the DVLA and the police, improving the speed of information provision. Consequently, manual data handling is expected to decrease, potentially reducing data sharing costs.