This post was authored by Scott Collins, Senior Consultant at Contino.

‘Tech Intensity’ was the theme of Satya Nadella’s keynote as he kicked off Microsoft’s 2019 Ignite conference in Orlando.

The announcement of features such as Azure Arc, Azure Synapse and, my personal favourite, an insight into ‘Project Silica’ (more on which below!) set the tone for a week of deep dives, demos and hands-on workshops with some of the best minds Microsoft has to offer.

As I arrived at the Orange County Convention Center at 6.30 on Monday morning, ready to claim my place in the same room as…

This article was written by Gerald Bachlmayr, Technical Principal at Contino (APAC) and AWS Ambassador.

Why do we need presentation skills?

As a consultant I work closely with our customers to achieve a good business outcome. This requires a lot of interaction with key stakeholders in many different contexts, such as workshops, presentations, knowledge sharing sessions, or informal discussions.

Contino is also active in the meetup scene, and I regularly present at these types of events. Therefore, I have to be comfortable on stage, voicing my opinions to strangers who turn up to hear me speak.

Presentation skills are critical to all these interactions. I recently…

In most enterprise transformation journeys, there comes a time when it makes sense to start centralizing services used by multiple teams within a single platform team. This can be due to licensing issues or to lower the operational overhead that results from every team having to maintain their own stack.

Either way, it is a big decision.

Because, once you centralize, the SLA for the service becomes a lot higher and any outages cascade to multiple teams. What’s more, it is important that the central offerings don’t become the defacto toolset. …

By Andrew Khoury, Technical Principal, Contino

Let’s talk about the real cost of cloud computing, and by that I don’t mean hourly pricing models, network charges, and licencing implications.

I want to talk about opportunity cost, explore factors like speed to market, how effective our development teams can be, and the operational overheads involved in our technology choices.

The famous Allan Denot once said…

“If you believe in the cloud, you can’t be agnostic.”

…and by famous I mean in DevOps/Sydney, and by once I mean January 2019.

I believe in the cloud! When I make that statement, it doesn’t…

By Ryan Lockard, VP Consulting, Contino

Tell me if this sounds familiar: a team commits to shipping a set of features to the business. The scope of the delivery time is 2–3 months. Time passes and the scope reduces and the delivery increases. In the end we ship a fraction of the features and in the end 2–3 months effectively doubled to 5–6 months. If this sounds like a similar tune to your world, you are not alone. This is sadly pretty standard in enterprise product development worlds. …

By Brett Luckabaugh, Account Principal, Contino

Everyone is familiar with the phrase “if you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never meant to be.” IT Risk can be a lot like that, it sounds crazy but hear me out for a second. Organizations today are desperate to get to a better place in their IT shops, by adopting Agile, DevOps, utilizing Big Data and ML/AI. Most of these companies barely dip their toe into the depths of each of these concepts, while leadership touts their “modern…

This article was written by Jesse White, Vice President at Contino.

In the middle of 2018 it occurred to me that I should be thinking about what technology would have the biggest impact on our enterprise clients and the market in 2019. After a full 60 seconds I decided it would be Kubernetes, and in the next 60 I decided to write a book on it.

How’d I get to that inflection point? Let’s check.

Around 4.5 years ago I started the DockerNYC group, dedicated to the pursuit of running cutting edge container workloads. Since then I’ve spent time as…

These quick thoughts come from the mind of Benjamin Wootton, Co-founder and CTO of Contino.

A few quick thoughts on some approaches that I see time and again in the enterprise that will stop you from getting the most out of your cloud programme.

1. Cloud Broker: Putting big enterprise-y bloatware between you and your cloud APIs

The multi-cloud sales pitches emphasise the consistent experience and controls across clouds, but the reality is that you end up stuck with outdated APIs, leaky abstractions, and tied into lowest common denominator services. Stick with native access to your cloud!

Be careful as…