Blogs | FikaWorks

Consultancy Utilization

Every consultancy is concerned about utilization numbers. In this post I want to explore what utilization is and how it impacts the delivery of the services you as a customer contracted them to deliver. This is yet another facet to consider next to cloud partner programs when vetting your consultants. The Single Purpose Consultancy First let’s start simple. Lets consider you have a single purpose consultancy. For simplicity you have a series of highly skilled engineers in one cloud provider, and this is what your company specializes in.

Starting FikaWorks Collective

As of 13th of May 2020, we are officially registered as a coop with the Dutch chamber of commerce under the FikaWorks1 name. FikaWorks is a collective (a coop) of independent IT consultants from the Netherlands, active in the cloud native area. While everybody moved from employment into freelancing for his own reasons (freedom of choosing projects, financials, more free days, flexible schedule, tired of reporting to managers etc.) there are common things that tie us together:

EKS Service Accounts Explained

A few months ago AWS released The ability to add IAM permissions to pods. For some, myself included, this was a confusing implementation. This article will helpfully clear up some of the confusion on what AWS is actually doing, and what I believe they did right and what they did wrong. How it works To start we need to forget everything AWS told you about how it works, especially around annotations and such.

Cloud Partner Programs: A Numbers Game

All the top cloud providers currently have partner programs, but the tier systems can be misleading and are not indicative of the quality of service you may receive from your vendors. In this article I will discuss the cloud provider’s leveling systems and what to take into consideration when choosing your System Integrator (referred to as SI). The Current System There are several issues around the current partner systems.

Deploying Kubernetes addons with Makefiles

This article demonstrate how applications together with their configuration can be organized in a repository and deployed using Make. In this case, all the applications that form the required eco-system to run an environment (nginx ingress controller, prometheus, rbac, pod security policies, etc.). In Kubernetes such application are called addons and are usually managed by a cluster administrator. For the one that are impatient, the source code of such structure is available on Github.