Streamlining the Building of a Digital Government Through a Shared Tech Stack

Singapore government development practices are aligned to our Digital Government Blueprint of creating a world-class digital government in a Smart Nation that leverages the latest technology to serve our citizens and businesses. To do so, we need to enable a consistent service standard across the Government comprising user-centric services that do not compromise on security. Thus, a robust development stack that supports modern application development across the Government has been adopted. Apart from leveraging cloud technologies securely, the Singapore government also aims to cultivate in-house engineering expertise, bring engineering efforts across the whole-of-government (WOG) closer, and simplify code collaboration and reuse.

Singapore Government Tech Stack (SGTS)

The Singapore Government Tech Stack (SGTS) provides all government agencies with a shared digital infrastructure, services, and tools. It comprises software and infrastructure components that are scalable, reusable, and interoperable. The two layers of the SGTS are the base and services layers, which contain components that cover the entire app development life cycle.

Through the SGTS, government agencies can develop applications in a better, smarter, and faster way as they can now tap a ready suite of products and services to produce services of a high quality and standard. This streamlines development processes and allows citizens and businesses to experience a more secure, seamless, consistent, and connected user experience across government digital services. SGTS also facilitates a collaborative engineering culture within the Government by creating a common source code repository.

Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC)

GCC allows less sensitive government systems and information to be stored on a cloud computing platform. It provides agencies with a means of adopting commercial cloud solutions offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google without compromising on cybersecurity. Currently, more than 600 government systems have migrated to cloud.

By tapping cloud computing platforms, government agencies can circumvent racking, stacking, and maintaining on-site computing hardware. This gives development teams more time to focus on software engineering and delivering digital applications to internal and external stakeholders. GCC also enables government agencies to tap commercial cloud software when integrating advanced functionalities into government digital services, reducing the development timeline.

Given the rapidly changing digital landscape, GCC has been redesigned to leverage existing native cloud capabilities and increase its alignment with cloud security practices. The new GCC 2.0 will include new features such as access to an updated Cloud Management Portal, new experiences in endpoint device management, more reliance on native tools for speed and security, and faster and more controls for agencies. This empowers government officers to accelerate the development of digital government services with greater cost savings and security.

API Exchange (APEX)

APEX is a self-service API platform that functions as a centralised and secure API gateway and data sharing platform for the government. APEX allows public officers to publish, monitor, and discover APIs and datasets from across WOG conveniently, quickly, and securely. This encourages co-creation among public agencies and the rapid development of services as agencies can tap existing APIs and datasets instead of creating new ones from scratch.

Through APEX’s central administration dashboard, government officers can monitor system health checks and analytics. Other key features of APEX include its self-service model, provision of professional services, ability to support multi-tenanted Environments and modern RESTful and SOAP APIs.

Currently, APEX services over 100 million API calls monthly and supports approximately 2,400 API functions from government agencies in Singapore. 31 government agencies have been onboarded onto APEX, resulting in the housing of 44 projects.

Find out more about our government technology stack here:

• Singapore Government Tech Stack
• Government on Commercial Cloud
• APEX

Last updated 05 September 2022