This episode's musings are about security-in-depth with a daft analogy of Google Cloud's VPC Service Controls. Making use of multiple technologies to secure your IT.

This month's thoughts are around:

• Google Cloud Growth Continues to Accelerate
• Why Aren't You Testing Your Infrastructure Deployment Code?

 This month's thoughts are a series of articles in a tale of technical debt:

• The Cost of Poor Software Quality
• Planning for Technical Debt
• Developer Working Patterns During a Pandemic

 This month's thoughts are around:

• Unused resource management on The Cloud
• The cost of operations for startups
• Are your IT services portable?

 This month's thoughts are around:

• Digital rights management and open source
• Protecting your business against service downtime
• Trusted computing on Cloud infrastructure 

Mesoform Joins Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program

Bringing with them years of experience migrating and running enterprise-grade services on Google Cloud

London, 22nd May 2020 — Mesoform, today announced that it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program as a service partner, giving Google Cloud customers approved access to their years of experience, piloting and scaling solutions on Google Cloud.

As a Google Cloud partner, Mesoform offers services in architecture, engineering and organisational DevOps transformations. Mesoform has worked with clients in major industries such as finance, telecoms and government. They provide key benefits and expertise in various areas including:

• Containerisation
• Cloud migrations 
• Automation and infrastructure as code 
• Monitoring and logging 
• Data analytics and SIEM
• Custom coding solutions
• DevOps best practices 

We’ve spent the last three years working closely with a very large financial client to start their migration journey and expand their growth on Google Cloud. Collaborating with Google Cloud engineers on a number of early adopter programs was a great experience and very productive. So today is a really exciting time for Mesoform, to finally become a direct Google Cloud partner, I’m really looking forward to further projects we can work on together.  - Gareth Brown, Mesoform founder 

If you are looking to begin your Google Cloud journey, or simply to improve how you operate on Google Cloud, Mesoform can help. Reach out to Mesoform at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for a free consultation.

Containers have been around now for quite a few years. We can trace the concept back to 1979 and the introduction of the chroot system call but it wasn't until BSD Jails, Solaris Zones and LXC in 2000, 2004 and 2008 when the technology started to mature. Zones in particular became incredibly stable very early on. With a very high level of isolation and performance, capable of multi-tenancy systems.

With the rise of VMWare and IaaS providers like AWS, container technologies took a back seat as the masses embraced cloud computing.  Containers weren't fully able to satisfy the demands of ephemeral and dynamically scaling systems. However, in more recent years Docker has revitalised the interest back in this technology by introducing the idea of application containers and a powerful set of tools and infrastructure for maintaining container images.

Expanding the benefits beyond performance and resource utilisation gains, Docker improved standardisation, configuration management and portability, meaning containers are fast becoming the next hot technology (if they're not already). However, they do maintain some challenges in the Cloud. Specifically monitoring, orchestration (e.g. automated scheduling and auto-scaling) and service discovery are an additional burden.

For several years, cloud computing has been the focus of IT decision makers and corporate bean counters, but the extremely security-conscious have been hesitant to move their data and workloads into the cloud. Now, with the underlying technology behind cloud services available for deployment inside organizations, a new model of cloud computing is gaining a foothold in business: the hybrid cloud.

WHAT IS HYBRID CLOUD?

Optoro's Shift to Self-hosted Infrastructure - Optoro

Since 2010, Optoro has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud-computing provider. We relied on them to supply the horsepower needed to drive our IT resources and applications. However, after some hard analysis, we decided to move away from the AWS and onto our own infrastructure. At a time when so many SaaS’s/IaaS’s/PaaS’s exist, why would we decide to run a data-center’s worth of gear? AWS has been a large drain on our budget at scale, and we wanted a more cost-efficient solution.