Tailor made

First of all, let’s be clear. We are a small company based in the Netherlands existing of a bunch of nerds coming from mission critical environments. So, while we love shiny new tech, we also know there is much more to it, uptime, maintainability, security, data protection etc. it’s all part of running an environment that your business relies on.

Next to that we also know that customers are different, this can be because of your actual business (sector), culture, size etc. Because of this we always provide a tailor made service, which we can, because we intend to stay small in size reducing the internal need of generalizing.

This does not mean however that we don’t standardize, all our platforms (especially our managed services platforms) are built using the same blueprints, monitored by the same system and maintained by the same configuration management tools. This way we can guarantee a platform that is maintainable for us and let us focus on the actual integration with your environment while being assured that everything keeps working as expected.

The fun really starts when integrating the platforms with your own environment, building fully automated CI/CD flows, introducing auto-healing capabilities and working together with developers for making sure applications become cloud native. All for the joy of running an (almost) entirely self sustaining platform that will deliver your services quick and awesome!

1. Managed Hosting

We run a variety of platforms over multiple regions in Europe consisting of Mesosphere DCOS, Kubernetes and in the near future Rancher. These multitenant environments are build from the ground up with automation in mind, we use a cattle vs pets strategy. This means that the environment can survive most common problems, simply because it kills, destoys and recreates it’s services automatically. This helps us to guarantee a ²⁴⁄₇ uptime, and let’s us sleep in the night (well mostly…) the platforms themselves however are plain vanilla meaning they will support any type of integration as long as the providers deliver them. When integration is needed for tools that don’t have these out of the box, we will investigate and when possible provide this integration on our own environment.

This model is especially useful when building new applications where integration with your own environment can be done with application level transports (for example API’s or Pub/Sub messaging).

2. On-premise managed Hosting

When for whatever reason there is no option to either “run in the cloud” or you have your own cloud already built, we can deliver our platforms on your own network. This makes sure you will have a fully automated platform that we will manage remotely, making sure it stays up to date, secure and monitored. When using the more commonly used virtualization or cloud software we can provide autohealing and autoscaling capabilities.

This model might be needed when for whatever reason there is no way you can run everything remotely. It also comes with some specific requirements, meaning we would have to do an investigation of the current network and some preparation on the customers end might be needed. We can however provide consultancy here to make it smooth ride.

3. Consultancy and Training

As we run these environments for customers that don’t want the hassle to run these platforms themself, we have good knowledge of what it means (from a customers perspective) to deliver and run (cloud native) applications, developers might need to be retrained, ops engineers might have to learn new skills and product owners might need to reprioritize their backlog.

We also know that most training centers teach either the very basics or go way to deep in the matter to be effective. Which is why we give trainings where the focus doesn’t lay on a specific tool or commandline options (everybody has google, right?) and we won’t go through the whole source code (by the time you read it, everything has been refactored anyways) what we will do however is teach while guiding you to learn the concepts.

The great thing about all these new platforms is the amount of effort the community puts into them to deliver new features and fix bugs, this however can be very overwhelming for somebody who just starts out. By understanding the concepts behind it and teaching with real life scenario’s we think we can deliver a truely effective training.

Everybody can set up single node wordpress container with a single node ephemeral MySQL DB, it becomes a bit more tricky when you need to run an application consisting of a scalable secured frontend with loadbalancers, API’s with an API gateway, with a multinode MongoDB in different regions. All while being monitored, self healing and automatically discovered.

4. Anything else…

As said before, we always make sure that our services are tailor made, this means that the three services above are just an example (and mostly picked) set of services. Please do not hesitate to leave us a message for any question, maybe you have a burning DCOS environment and need someone to look at, maybe you just want to have some integrated monitoring or CI/CD pipelines built.

In anyway, no matter what you can always contact us, even if you just want to have some coffee, drink some beer or eat some italian food, just because…