We are a specialist Azure and cloud-native consultancy & engineering business based in the UK (London), delivering technology services and solutions to larger businesses.

As a business, we set out with clarity regarding the technology partnerships and some cloud-native tools that are strategically important to us, and ultimately to many of our customers. Selecting a set of strategic technologies and tools is important because it drives some strategic imperatives for our business. For example, these strategic technology choices:

• Define our research, development and training efforts.

• Bring clarity to the library Infrastructure as Code, designs, architectural patterns and artefacts that are valuable to our customers.

• Shape the integration work we do in our own labs. Building fully automated container and serverless platforms requires slick integration between key technology layers.

• Informs us which partners and their associated technologies we should spend quality time with and invest in. All successful partnerships require investment both ways.

• Ensures that our whole technical team know where they must go very deep. with technologies The team generally need to demonstrate broad technology platform knowledge (e.g. Directory services, DNS, cloud, networking, security, coding etc.) but they must show very deep capability with some key technologies (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Hashicorp Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, AKS, Rancher etc.)

Which partners and why   

There are over 500 technologies and technology companies listed in the cloud native computing foundation. This represents more technologies than any business would ever use. Simply navigating this array of technology choices is daunting to any business, especially when technology is not their core business. As a specialist cloud and cloud-native platform business, we will work with many of the technologies on the CNCF landscape, but it is important for us to handpick a quality subset of technologies and tools that enterprise solutions could be built upon and that we should excel in.

Microsoft Azure is our cloud service provider of choice. As a team we have a 10-year track record deploying enterprise Azure solutions and Microsoft have proven to be a very supportive partner along the way. While we have skills that stretch to other leading cloud providers we have doubled down on Microsoft Azure to ensure that we can provide the most elegant solutions possible to those customers that have Microsoft Azure on their strategic roadmap.

Portworx (by Pure Storage) overcomes some key challenges in delivering software-defined, scalable storage to the enterprise, especially for customers looking seriously at hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios. The team at Pure Storage and Portworx have also been great to work with.

SUSE Rancher is arguably the best open container management product on the market, allowing container platforms to be managed effectively across multiple deployment venues (e.g., On premise, at the edge, AWS and Azure). Rancher is a great choice for many businesses large enough to be deploying containers across a variety of deployment venues.

CIS SecureSuite alongside Azure Policy is part of our answer to building secure, compliant Azure-hosted container and serverless solutions with security featuring at the heart of the design. This is important to customers in different sectors, especially financial services and insurance.

Integrate and Codify

All the technology businesses we partner with provide complimentary cloud-native technologies, allowing us to build and integrate software defined, cloud-native platforms that can run at production scale and remain resilient and compliant through their life cycle. We will always choose to work with technologies that can be deployed, configured, managed, consumed elegantly with code. We expect, as do our customers, slick integration across the whole cloud-native architecture. As a business we pride ourselves on delivering valuable intellectual property, delivered to customers in a variety of forms, entirely geared around helping customers start or accelerate their cloud-native journey. This IP and know-how ranges from fully automated Azure container platform builds (e.g., Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Docker, Rancher, AKS) to Terraform code compliance tool integration, to quality enterprise designs and operational processes.

Being able to integrate and codify cloud-native technologies that can be operated at scale is critical to our strategy. Our technology focus and the partners we work with are critical to our success in delivering high quality solutions to the customers we serve.