Amido’s containerisation rolls out Coats web app

Industrial thread manufacturer stitches its industry’s digital agenda using Amido Azure container service.


amidoAmido, a technical consultancy specialising in assembling and integrating cloud technologies, has been chosen by Coats to build a scalable platform to help its customer base manage its corporate responsibility during the supply chain process.

Amido works with brands like ASOS, CBRE and Channel 5 to remove friction from their customers’ online and mobile experiences to drive revenue and engagement. The company are ranked 12th in The Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100 league table, the UK’s top 100 SMEs with the fastest-growing international sales

Furthering the company’s commitment to digitally transform its services, the application is one of the first enterprises to use Azure Container Services in a customer-facing environment. By using Amido’s technical expertise, Coats launched a web portal on a container-based platform, laying down a challenge to industry sceptics who are critical of container solutions.

Amido’s recommendation to use containers came from Coats’ requirements for an adaptable, scalable and manageable platform that would adhere to the strict regulations of global trading. With large investments from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the option of containers is becoming an early viable solution. Over the next three years, Amido predicts that there will be a large rise in its implementation.

“Containers give clients more control over the infrastructure they are deploying. This is because you are not creating a Virtual Machine for every instance of an application, meaning deployments are rapid and the overhead of the operating system is significantly lower.

“It means that we can issue an upgrade/change that will take effect almost immediately, without disruption to the general use of the portal. This advantage of application upgrades and changes is vital, especially when committed to digitally transform its services – without the added costs legacy systems can bring,” said Chris Gray, Technical Director of Amido.

Amido warns that containers are not a magic fix for all legacy or monolithic solutions and the decision to containerise software needs to be considered carefully. Containers are valuable when monolithic applications can be split into smaller components which can be distributed across a containerised infrastructure.

“We are breaking new ground in our industry with this platform. Speed is everything, so scaling and adapting is very important to us. We looked for a partner that understood all technologies, platforms and applications to help us. Amido met these requirements and we were able to create a system that not only challenged container-use perception at an enterprise level, but also did so in a timely and cost-effective manner,” said Basheer Shahul, Digital Solutions Director, at Coats.