Armakuni Limited

Armakuni Secure Azure Cloud Native Discovery and Adoption

Armakuni drives Azure cloud native discovery and adoption by combining our experienced engineers, knowledge of industry best practices with immersive, hands-on training and co-delivery of key organisational outcomes. We leverage our experience of working in public sector environments to exploit Azure's offering, often while extending an existing Microsoft estate

Features

• Azure Cloud Native & DevOps transformation consultancy
• Micro-service architecture design, implementation, training, consultancy and support
• Continuous Integration/Deployment consultancy, implementation, training and support
• Platform-as-a-Service, Container-as-a-Service & Serverless consultancy
• PaaS, CaaS & Serverless design, architecture, implementation and training
• PaaS/CaaS technology experience - Cloud Foundry, Openshift, Kubernetes, etc.
• Design/build/deliver Azure Cloud Native & DevOps training
• Bespoke transformational programmes for Azure Cloud Native and DevOps adoption
• Improve team health across Software Engineering
• Improve team culture across Software Engineering

Benefits

• Understand Microsoft Azure services and best practices
• Adoption of industry best practices which will drive efficiency
• Speed up your ability to deliver real end-user business value
• Simplify and streamline technology delivery aspects of your service provision
• Reduce deployment times and faster feedback cycles
• Automated infrastructure and platform provisioning
• Improves system redundancy, resilience and observability
• Deploy a full tested change into production with 100% confidence
• Transform the technology delivery capabilities of your organisation
• Transform your culture to one of continuous learning and improvement

£225 to £1,900 a unit a day

• Education pricing available

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at accounts@armakuni.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

384908961826237

Contact

Maryana Berezdetska
02074594330
accounts@armakuni.com

Planning

• Planning service: Yes
• How the planning service works: Adopting cloud isn't a technical or budget based decision. It spans people, process and technology.; Armakuni start an engagement by helping the organisation understand the landscape.; OBSERVE; Through a mixture of assessments and workshops, we understand and visualise the culture, capability and technology across an organisations teams and products.; ORIENTATE; We process the data we have collated and present it in a format that allows the participants to clearly identify where help is needed.; DECIDE; Once we can see the landscape clearly, we can work with the client to plan the next steps forward.; To do this, we will create a hypothesis around what we thing will make a change and move the dials on the metrics we have observed.; We then create low cost, low risk experiments to test out these theories before committing fully.; We believe in this approach, as all organisations are different.; ACT; We run some experiments, embracing the potential for these experiments to fail or not work well, with a view to finding the approaches that do work, that we can progress and move beyond the experiment level.; At this point, we review the data and start the loop again.
• Planning service works with specific services: Yes
• Hosting or software services the planning service works with:
  • Azure (Partner)
  • Any container based platform
  • Any Kubernetes installation
  • VMWare Platforms
  • PaaS - CloudFoundry, Openshift
  • CaaS - Containers As A Service
  • Serverless
  • Public Cloud providers

Training

• Training service provided: Yes
• How the training service works: We offer a comprehensive portfolio of immersive training courses to help accelerate clients' understanding and use of Azure Cloud Native & DevOps culture, principles, practices and tools.; This enables enterprise-wide transformation of development, operations and leadership teams.; Our courses are delivered either as public courses or as bespoke client-specific training. Public courses are instructor-led in a classroom environment following a standard syllabus. Client-specific training is more flexible, and cost-effective facilitated either as instructor-led in a classroom environment or a ‘lab’ providing immersive in-depth on-the-job training using a real-world project as the focus of the training; deliver real end-user business value while skilling up and transforming your technology delivery teams. All our courses enable participants to immediately apply these transformative practices and principles in their workplace. We also design and deliver bespoke adoption programmes to create lasting change beyond the training. Using a rigorous data driven approach we work with your organisation to baseline your teams, co-design and implement experiments to uplift their capabilities and make lasting and sustainable improvements. Course examples: Cloud Native architecture for developers and for project managers (product owners) DevOps Culture, Principles and Practices Beginner and Advanced courses for Cloud Foundry, Openshift, Kubernetes and Serverless
• Training is tied to specific services: No

Setup and migration

• Setup or migration service available: Yes
• How the setup or migration service works: Our team works individually or as part of a client team to implement Cloud Native development and operations practices, integrating your platform with existing systems and extending the platform to meet the organisation's requirements.; ; Examples of platform integration and extension include logging, monitoring and alerting, backup and restore, disaster recovery, automated deployment, service broker creation, and integration with client-specific services.; ; Examples include access control (i.e. setup and ongoing administration of organizations, spaces, users, groups, roles, domains, routes, etc.) and Active Directory integration, platform admin (i.e. ongoing upgrades and patches), health monitoring (i.e. pro-active monitoring of platform and setup/response to alerts, diagnosis and remedy), and business admin (i.e. usage reporting, chargeback administration, etc.).
• Setup or migration service is for specific cloud services: No

Quality assurance and performance testing

• Quality assurance and performance testing service: Yes
• How the quality assurance and performance testing works: Most aspects of quality and assurance, and performance testing can be automated.; Our entire ethos is about automating these services and building them into the release cycle.; Whilst we can provide these services if required, our value add is ENABLING your people to understand how to build this into the deployment of every single unit of software/infrastructure that is being deployed.; Once a mindset of automation is created within your staff and they understand the power of good quality automated testing, the production quality will rocket.

Security testing

• Security services: Yes
• Security services type: Other
• Other security services:
  • Automation of security services/practices
  • Implement security testing into CI/CD pipelines
  • Continuous Governance

Ongoing support

• Ongoing support service: No

Service scope

• Service constraints: The Armakuni range of services is about ""enabling"" our clients. We help clients build HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS.; This necessitates a range of different approaches.; But DO NOT:; * Provide support services (but we might provide coaching services); * Provide CTO services (but we might run workshops to influence and drive decisions); ; Other constraints are currently unknown

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: No
• Phone support: No
• Web chat support: No
• Support levels: Armakuni provide engineers and consultants to support change and transformation - our aim is to enable our clients to be able to support themselves.; In this capacity, we do not provide a production level out of hours support service, however we do provide support contacts during working hours.; We can, if required provide some levels of support/drawdown consultancy for our engineering coaches, but this is not a commercial software support agreement.

Resellers

• Supplier type: Not a reseller

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Conforms to BS7858:2019
• Government security clearance: Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: No
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: Yes
• Cyber essentials plus: Yes
• Other security certifications: No

Social Value

• Social Value:

  Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Covid-19 recovery
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

  Fighting climate change

  Armakuni has partnered with Positive Planet a leading external consultancy to assist us on our Net Zero journey, Positive Planet are helping Armakuni to better understand our carbon emissions and how to reduce them using informed carbon reduction strategies. We have already calculated our carbon footprint for 2021. Using this data we have developed government compliant carbon reduction plan with clear targets and commitments. We have already certified as Carbon Neutral and we aim to certify as a Net Zero company by 2030 at the latest. Our carbon analysis extends beyond the requirements to be transparent and is publically shared (https://positiveplanet.uk/company-dashboards/armakuni/#), the analysis will be increasingly more detailed over the coming years. Our journey will be under continued review internally and externally to ensure we hit our targets. ; Our client engagements are focused on efficient use of resources, we achieve this in three ways. In our deliveries we ensure instances are automatically scaled according to demand, many of our engagements involve rearchitecting services to be cloud-native (using containers and “serverless” technologies maximises the resharing of resources, eliminating wasted server time and thus minimising the carbon footprint of applications). Finally, we maximise the use of reserved instances which are more efficient than on demand resources.

  Covid-19 recovery

  Armakuni was founded by a team working at Comic Relief and as such the organisation has always had a strong people focus. Armakuni has well established processes to support the physical and mental wellbeing of employees through a range of services including BUPA, virtual GP Appointments, Employee Assistance and Mental Health Support via Spill. These services and policies such as "remote first working" help to support our people and reduce the demand on public services. Central to our engagement approach is the focus on transferring knowledge, re-skilling and uplifting the capability of the retained teams within our clients. This increasingly relates to the re-skilling of teams whose focus has been legacy technology (on-prem, COTS, waterfall) to modern cloud-native, open-source and agile ways of working. We also partner with leading training organisations to support the recruitment of under represented groups into highly attractive technology engineering jobs, this includes CodeUntapped, Bright Network and QA. We supported the Welsh Government's Covid-19 response and recovery by building a strategic Data Visualisation Platform that allowed Ministers, Civil Servants, Clinicians and Public Health professionals to have all the relevant data instantly available and shareable to drive timely and improved decision making. One of the services we built with the Welsh Government allowed policy makers to model the impact of various policy decisions on the spread of Covid through the Welsh population, to drive strategic response to the pandemic (described here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTWmeJXe9vg). All services for this engagement were procured through GCloud and Armakuni gave a significant discount against our published SFIA rate card. As a remote first employer, our people were able to maintain bubbles and safe distancing by working from home. Now restrictions are lifted we encourage our people to only travel when necessary.

  Tackling economic inequality

  We partner with Code Untapped whose mission is to empower the underrepresented community to fulfil their potential through increasing diversity in technology. They provide a platform to help people from under-represented communities develop their technical skills, instil in them an entrepreneurial spirit, and help them acquire jobs with their partners. Armakuni provide mentorship for Code Untapped's community using our consultant's skills and experience to support the growth of individuals and the programme. When individuals are placed with clients our engineers provide 1-to-1 coaching and mentorship to help them with the challenges they face and uplift their skills. We provide this services free of charge as part of our ongoing commitment to expanding economic opportunities for traditionally under-represented groups. We also developed and delivered training programmes on modern engineering practices to Code Untapped cohorts, introducing them to principles and practices that will enable them to be successful in the world of cloud native software development. As a remote first employer we employ colleagues from all geographies across the United Kingdom, some of these areas are considered to be deprived ie Sunderland, West Wales. Remuneration is based upon experience and is not varied based upon UK location. Armakuni focuses on the adoption of open source, multi-cloud, containerised technologies by clients, our deliveries are highly resilient, highly scalable and high-portable. Our approach enables Clients to adopt new technology solutions and overcome technical debt thereby avoiding vendor lock-ins and the associated costs. Armakuni have a culture of collaboration with clients that extends to the clients rainbow portfolio of vendors. We are advocates of modern engineering best practice that ensure security and risk postures are appropriate for the context of each delivery.

  Equal opportunity

  Armakuni works on a 'remote first' policy where individuals' contracted place of work is from home unless required to travel for client and company meetings. We are an Equal Opportunities employer and provide reasonable adjustments to meet the needs of our people. We actively celebrate diversity across the organisation and have made significant strides in recognising the neuro-diversity agenda across our workforce. Armakuni is a member of the Tech Talent Charter - Bringing together industries and organisations to drive greater inclusion and diversity in technology roles. Armakuni provides all employees with a £2000 annual Learning budget and 5 training days per year to focus on their own continuous learning. Individual support is provided by our Continuous Learning Lead and a team of Pastoral Managers to support our people. Despite falling outside the category of companies that must publish a Modern Slavery Policy, Armakuni has an active Modern Slavery Policy which monitors all critical risk areas such as supply chain for risk.

  Wellbeing

  Armakuni places a strong emphasis on Health and Wellbeing for our people and strives to constantly review our approach to ensure we are providing relevant support to our people. Armakuni were recognised externally by Great Places to Work in 2022, Armakuni were highly ranked in the Small Company Category as one of the leading companies in this area. ; ; We provide access to Private Medical Insurance, an online GP service, an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) as well as a newly launched therapy platform to support the mental health of our people through free access to therapists. Individuals are also provided with a monthly Wellness allowance to support their own wellbeing initiatives whether that be a yoga class or gym membership.; ; Individuals also have access to a cycle to work scheme.; ; Private Medical insurance, GP services and therapy reduce the burden on public services feeling them up for communities who require their services and reducing wait time for those in need.; ; We worked with Welsh Government to open source the work we did for them to enable other governments and groups to use the technology in future. We actively give back to the tech community through encouraging our staff to participate in the wider community during our learning days, (time when staff spend on personal and organisational learning). A number of our staff contribute to open source projects that support various technical communities and speak at conferences and meetups. We also do matched funding for any staff initiatives fundraising for charities and the community, which in recent times have included LGBT and gender equality groups. ; ; We work with Code Untapped to support those from under represented communities. We are also signatories of the Tech Talent Charter, showing our commitment to driving greater inclusion and diversity in tech.

Pricing

• Price: £225 to £1,900 a unit a day
• Discount for educational organisations: Yes

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Skills Framework for the Information Age rate card

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at accounts@armakuni.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.