GRNET – National Infrastructures for Research and Technology, operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Digital Governance  has been highly involved with the digital transformation of the Greek public sector and, since 2019, GRNET is responsible for the development, operation and maintenance of the gov.gr portal (Greece’s public sector information website) and several governmental services, including the electronic issuance of documents signed by the Greek state, and a digital wallet that Greek citizens can use to control how they share identification data among others.

To support the development and operation of these services, GRNET teams including primarily the SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team, developers and the security team, developed AppStack, a cloud-native platform with an enabling environment for integrating open-source software (OSS) components. After four years of operation of this platform, the Head of the Directorate of Reliability Engineering (GRE) and Associate Professor at EKPA D. Mitropoulos and the Head of Systems Architecture at GRNET G. Tsoukalas, in an article in the world-renowned magazine USENIX ;login:, present this platform, its features and its capabilities. In addition, they showcase important experiences that the technical teams and the organisation gained from its operation.

Today, the specific platform hosts a multitude of services that include the digital portal gov.gr and provides the ability to issue hundreds of different types of documents (e.g., affidavit, power of attorney) digitally signed by the Greek state. The platform’s infrastructure includes dozens of servers, hundreds of virtual machines, and terabytes of storage space.

Read the full article here: https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/appstack-agile-platform-running-digital-public-services