Products & Services
The software delivery life cycle as like a pipeline. The pipeline has multiple phases, each of which can become a bottleneck. We offer a range of services designed to optimise flow, and to help you deliver maximum value to your organisation, as fast as possible.
Optimized Development Environments
The process of building and delivering quality software is often slowed down by the environment in which develpers work. Frequently there's a dearth of live-like development environments, and the process of testing is often manual and slow.
We provide bespoke solutions based around local or cloud virtualization, and built upon our foundation of Chef-managed automated infrastructure. This means you can be confident of a testing environemnt that is the same as production, putting an end to 'it works on my machine'.
We're firm believers in test-driven development, and recommend setting up continuous integration systems to provide fast feedback. Where appropriate we can help you introduce deployment pipelines and work towards a model of continuous delivery, enabling you to get the minimal viable product out into customers' hands as rapidly as possible.
Infrastructure design
Whether you're an established business looking to improve your current environment, or a startup wondering how to scale to the next level, our consultants will work with you to design the ideal infrastructure to support your business. Our engineers have experience with some of the largest and most heavily used systems in the world, and deep and wide-ranging expertise - you couldn't be in safer hands.
We recognize that for emerging businesses, or units within a large company seeking to demonstrate value, what counts is getting results quickly. However, cutting corners on infrastructure design stores up technical debt which needs to be paid off some day, and often the collectors come calling at the most inconvenient times. We'll work with you to unsure your systems are scaleable - that they can grow rapidly in the event of huge success, or can be scaled back effectively when times are tough.
Configuration management
Fundamental to all we do is the belief that your whole environment - from desktops and workstations, through testing and staging environments, right up to production should be under confuguration management.
In order to build an infrastructure that delivers value to the business, we need to integrate various resources and components. We build these components using the Opscode Chef framework, which allows us to treat the various resources as code, and manage them using tried and tested software development methodlogies. This means that every component of your infrastructure is under version control, is repeatable, is clonable, is testable, is documented and is built according to current best practices.
Hosting, Cloud migration and Deployment
We understand that hosting a live website isn't a trivial undertaking. With the huge choice of hosting providers, cloud vendors, platform services, not to mention operating systems and distrubutions, it's easy to get bogged down in the detail, and difficult to keep track of the options and make sure you've got the right setup.
Our consultants will guide you to choose the right solution, and will help you if you've been sold, or inherited a system that's not working out for you. We're experts at migrating systems into the cloud, but re quick to point out that the cloud isn't the answer to everything, and isn't alwasys the right tool for the job. We'll also keep on top off all the options and let you know if we think there's a better deal or technology available that keeps you ahead of the game.
Two aspects of production services that are often poorly implemented or not implemented at all are backups and monitoring - we'll help you work our what you need, and get you set up so you can sleep at night without worrying about your systems.
Training, Coaching and Mentoring
At Atalanta Systems, we like to position ourselves as enablers. We're not interested in coming in and fixing your problem, taking your money, and leaving you no better off in terms of understanding the cause or the solution. For this reason, we consider training and mentoring to be a crucial part of our service offering.
We're Opscode's preferred training provider for Chef in Europe, and are working with Amazon to begin providing training for the range of Amazon Web Services offerings. We can provide customised training on site, and also run regular public training courses.
Along with formal training, we provide a coaching and menotring servive, particularly for operations teams wanting to learn how to bring the benefits of agile and lean approaches into their organisation. We'll come and work with you, get to grips with the areas where you're thriving and the areas where you need help, and will help build your team and your skills. We can run one or two day restrospectives following projects, or just come an hang out with you every so often and give you support.
Software tools
We understand that everyone's business is different, and while wherever possible we try to steer our clients to use popular, well-supported and open-source software, sometimes there's a need for a custom solution. We have significant experience of delivering bespoke tools and web applications in Ruby and Python, and can provide introductions to talented UK-based iPhone and Android development teams.