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:
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.
Firstly, let me explain why I believe I know a little on the subject. I want to invite you to come back in time to the Technology Management Centre for a large Telco in the early 00s where a young man has just sat down for his first day on the job and his supervisor, Spencer hands him a drive bay (hot desking was serious business here) and says, "I recommend you do a stage 1 install of Gentoo because it'll will be a good learning exercise to set up the Operaing System from scratch. Then, when you're done, we'll go over this script I'm working on to automate some tests on our new Cisco 10K routers."
I'd never compiled an operating system before that point, so we never made it to the script but it was the first time in my career when I was suddenly plunged into a world of highly skilled engineers and architects, simply doing some amazing things under very tight requirements and needing to be "DevOps", just to ensure their success. Scripting and automating tests, building our own configuration management system, measuring everything that moved, working cross-functionally, high collaboration and information sharing across teams were all just the norm. We'd also virtualised our environments and were even running containers in production over ten years ago.
From that point, my work career continued in much the same way. Sure, there has been some challenges trying to help some people see the vision but now there is a DevOps community and a wealth of literature, those challenges mostly went away and the approach was less about pushing an agenda to simply agreeing with peoples ideas as they embraced the philosophies as well.
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.
Analyst(s):
Anne Thomas, Aashish GuptaCommercial Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platforms' revenue declined in 2015, indicating a clear shift in the application platform market. Digital business initiatives require new features and capabilities in application platforms, and Java EE has failed to keep pace.
The market is becoming more diverse as vendors and open-source communities produce innovative and specialized platforms to support modern application requirements.
Application platform as a service (aPaaS) revenue is currently less than half of application platform software revenue, but aPaaS is growing at an annual rate of 18.5%, and aPaaS sales will supersede platform software sales by 2023.
Application leaders responsible for modernizing application infrastructure should:
Managing value-driven, cross-functional (ValCro) projects in JIRA can be challenging to keep everything cleanly wrapped up together. Here's a proven idea which may work for you too.
So going back a few years, I was working at a software company where IT Operations was in the common situation of constantly playing catchup with Agile software development. We were already hammering home DevOps processes like tight feeback loops, sharing, learning and automation but collaboration was still a problem. Mostly around communicating around interdependant work, forward planning any work dependencies and keeping semi-automated, low-effort reports across teams.
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.