So let's build it from scratch. Our solution:

* Ruby on Rails (@rails)
* GOV.UK Design System
* GOV.UK PaaS (built on top of @cloudfoundry)
* Concourse (@concourseci)

All of this is #opensource software, helping us fight against #coronavirus

Requirements:

* Have excellent #accessibility
* Handle very spiky load
* Store very sensitive personally identifiable information securely
* Ship to prod in ~three days

Meeting those is a big ask from an off-the-shelf solution.

The form sounds fairly bread-and-butter, but GOV.UK is mostly content, not forms. So how? Government has a few low-code form builders, but GDS don't have a preferred one. We spoke to @MoJGovUK about theirs, and looked closely at a few others.

Thanks to GOV.UK PaaS and @cloudfoundry, we can deploy services to the cloud at scale in minutes, and deploy changes with minimal downtime.

(We're pretty over-scaled at the moment - 30 instances with 2GiB RAM each. Why not though? #itsfreerealestate)

Thanks to the GOV.UK Design System, we're able to build services which are consistent with GOV.UK and have #accessibility at their heart.

Thanks to @rails, we can build secure, accessible web applications quickly.

Thanks also to the dozens of other open source projects that helped us build, run and test this thing.

github.com/alphagov/govuk…

Thanks to @concourseci, we can create robust continuous deployment pipelines that let our team deliver working software to production quickly.

Finally, thanks to the incredible team of people that worked on this, we were able to release on time. Since Monday, over 350,000 people have submitted their details, and people are now receiving help.

If you want to see what great developers look like:

github.com/alphagov/govuk…

A few stats since we started building:

* 450 commits
* 189 pull requests
* 272 deployments to staging
* 63 deployments to production