VA’s Platform One Powers Rapid Innovation to Bolster Digital Services

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Platform One has significantly accelerated software development timelines, reducing application build times from weeks to days or even hours. Matthew Fuqua, technical lead for VA’s Platform One, told GovCIO Media & Research that the platform is streamlining the way the agency delivers digital services to veterans.

Modeled after the Defense Department’s enterprise container platforms, VA’s Platform One is part of a broader government effort to move away from traditional waterfall development in favor of agile, cloud-native environments. These modern approaches are especially critical now, as the new administration pushes for faster technology adoption and innovation across federal agencies.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order revising federal cybersecurity policies. The order instructs agencies to prioritize secure software development while removing what the administration calls “burdensome” and “unproven” practices from previous policies, according a White House fact sheet. The directive falls in line with broader tech calls from the new administration, emphasizing speed, flexibility and operational efficiency — goals at the core of VA’s Platform One.

Creating VA’s Platform One

VA’s iteration of Platform One, which has been in operation since 2021, has been centered around achieving “speed, stability, scale and security,” Fuqua explained. He added that prior to the VA’s iteration of Platform One, the team did a fact finding mission at agencies like the Air Force and Navy to get inspiration.

He said they “stole little pieces” from each, pulling components and ideas that were successful while avoiding roadblocks and hurdles that affected those teams. VA’s Platform One even uses containers from the Air Force’s Ironbank and modifies them to suit the VA team’s needs.

“What we learned from them is that we want to focus on one platform first. We might add additional platforms in the future but focus on that,” Fuqua said. “[They gave us] great insights on what they’ve tried and failed. They even went and built their own open-source platform, which [while] we don’t have the resources for that, they were very instrumental, and the Navy was a close second.”

VA designed Platform One to take the onus of security and development away from software developers, so they could focus on coding new applications that could help veterans and those at the VA who serve them.

“We spent a lot of time building a platform that was scalable, that had security in mind and we set that up so developers don’t even have to think about the platform anymore. They just write their code, worry about their code and move on,” Fuqua said.

Fuqua also emphasized the platform’s cloud capability, which offers consistency no matter where it runs.

“It’s exactly the same no matter what it is. If it runs in one place, it’s going to run in the other. It gives you a nice portability and reliability,” he said.

Delivering Software at Speed

The change in strategy has dramatically sped up development cycles, saving developers from building large applications that took weeks down to days or even hours.

“Before, you’d put in a ticket and build out a big environment and then you finally get access and all those things,” Fuqua said. “Those were not fast processes before. Now we can provision you within an hour and then you have the keys to the car.”

That time savings allows the Platform One team to onboard other developers and provide security on the platform with quick and frequent patches. Security is managed by the Platform One team, which allows developers to focus on coding while vulnerabilities are patched out using standardized practices like continuous monitoring.

Fuqua said the team patches every Tuesday and currently works within 4 environments: dev, test, pre-production and production.

“It makes it faster for us to implement a fix and test and then actually do the deployment. We’re taking something that used to be a 30-day process and shooting it down to minutes or hours, or a day, just to be safe,” Fuqua told GovCIO Media & Research.

Integrating AI and Machine Learning

As AI and machine learning technologies evolve, VA’s Platform One team is exploring how to integrate these tools into its development ecosystem.

“We’re in the process of taking these [large language models] and building them out and containerizing them if we can, but updating them with the security,” Fuqua said.

He added the team is constructing containers akin to LEGOs so developers can, “take these building blocks and actually take an idea that one of our fine doctors or research people have, put it in the container and do some testing in it and just make that process easier.”

He said the team is building a repository for developers to share so the technology is ready to go when it’s approved.

“The goal is to have a sandbox environment that can test your idea and see if it’s even viable or what’s out there already that you could reuse,” he said.