In the fast-paced world of trading, Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance is crucial—but managing notifications from multiple exchanges can be complex. Our team delivered a secure, scalable solution to streamline this process, leveraging Google Cloud technologies for authentication, message management, and security.
By implementing a Cloud Run Function for authentication, Pub/Sub for message handling, and robust security measures with Secret Manager, ACM, and IAM, we ensured reliable message delivery, data integrity, and secure access control. This solution not only simplifies KYC processing today but also provides a strong foundation for future enhancements.
In this blog, we’ll break down how we built it, the challenges we solved, and the impact it delivers. Let’s dive in!
Cutting corners by making developers handle non-specialist tasks might seem like a money-saver, but it often backfires. Every distraction, whether unnecessary meetings or out-of-scope work, slows progress. Context-switching is an invisible drain on productivity, and if ignored, it can derail entire projects.
The fix? Platform engineering and internal developer platforms (IDPs). By centralising and automating development workflows, IDPs remove distractions, keep developers focused on their core work, and ultimately save time and money.
This blog unpacks why context-switching is so damaging, its impact on performance, and how an IDP can be the key to eliminating it. If you want a more productive development team and real cost savings, read on…
In recent years, there has been significant growth in technological advancements that are transforming how businesses operate and how consumers interact with brands. For example, a major shift is reflected in changing buying habits, with more consumers turning to mobile devices (m-commerce) to make purchases or using virtual environments to try on items and explore brands before visiting physical stores. Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR) technologies are now enabling consumers to experience virtual try-ons, creating realistic spaces for product experimentation.
In 2023, sectors like gaming and entertainment were projected to see considerable growth, creating new opportunities for communities to engage with their favourite artists or personalities. For example, consumers could use QR codes to purchase exclusive items that later become collectible, opening up new avenues for brand engagement. Social media platforms are also playing a significant role in facilitating shopping experiences, with live-streaming content directly driving sales.
Some industries are embracing a ‘digitally first’ strategy, constantly exploring new ways to connect with customers through multiple online channels. With aspirations of expanding internationally, these industries are also leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance customer experiences through personalised, community-driven approaches. This shift is not just about customer experiences but extends to how companies use technology to interact with consumers and stay ahead of the curve.
In the constantly evolving world of cyber threats, a variety of roles within cyber security are essential for protecting an organisation’s assets and sensitive data. These roles range from data administration to more advanced offensive and defensive strategies, with each contributing a unique function to safeguard businesses from cyber-attacks.
When a platform designed to support thousands of projects begins to outgrow its limits, scaling for the future becomes a major challenge. This was the case for a global financial institution with an ambitious Internal Developer Platform (IDP). With growth projections of 5x-10x, their platform needed to evolve from "massive" to "colossal." To tackle this, we introduced Athena—our custom, enterprise version of Mesoform Athena—designed to handle unprecedented scale while meeting the complex demands of a highly regulated industry. Here's how we transformed their platform for the future.
Be careful what you wish for: An overview of Kubernetes apiVersions
When working with Kubernetes, we all frequently make calls to retrieve or create resources. Whenever we run kubectl apply or kubectl get, we are requesting that an object be added to or retrieved from the database. When we write a manifest, we always include an apiVersion attribute but what does this mean and how does Kubernetes respond to different values?
This episode's musings are about the negative effects of the positive attributes of generative AI
In this edition of Tech Musings, we will delve into the world of cybersecurity, exploring a few useful security decisions we recommend to our valued clients and some future trends and predictions we see in the industry. In an increasingly interconnected digital landscape, protecting sensitive data and safeguarding online assets have become paramount for individuals and organisations alike. With cyber threats evolving at an alarming rate, making informed security choices is no longer optional - it's a necessity.
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 episode's thoughts are around project to product transformation - a white paper by Ross Clanton and Amy Walters:
Introduction to Centralised Monitoring: Enhancing Visibility and Performance
In the fast-paced and interconnected digital landscape, the complexity of managing diverse IT systems and networks has surged. To tackle this challenge, organisations are increasingly turning to centralised monitoring, a robust approach that provides a unified and comprehensive view of their entire infrastructure. Centralised monitoring involves consolidating the monitoring of various components, systems, cloud environments and applications into a centralised platform, offering real-time insights and analytics. This shift from siloed monitoring to a centralised model is driven by the need for enhanced visibility, proactive issue detection, and overall operational efficiency.
Securing Crypto Trading App Infrastructure: A Customer Success Story
In the dynamic world of digital innovation, securing a scalable app deployment remains a formidable challenge. Our recent work for a crypto trading startup mirrors this pursuit: the quest for a robust, lightweight, and highly secure architecture for a trading app. This challenge reflects the industry's demand for fortified security amidst a landscape rife with potential threats. In this particular project, Mesoform was employed, not only to provide site reliability, cloud and DevOps engineering but a complete technical architecture and technology management over the whole project. Guiding platform engineering, software engineering and DevOps, as well as architecture and UI design, our holistic approach aimed to optimise project performance and functionality in order to deploy a Crypto Trading App for a crypto trading startup.
Creating A Highly Secured Crypto Trading App Database: A Customer Success Story
In this particular project, Mesoform was employed, not only to provide site reliability, cloud and DevOps engineering but a complete technical architecture and technology management over the whole project. Guiding platform engineering, software engineering and DevOps, as well as architecture and UI design, our holistic approach aimed to optimise project performance and functionality in order to deploy a Crypto Trading App for ProTraders.
Crypto Trading App Deployed On Serverless Infrastructure: A Customer Success Story
In this particular project, Mesoform was employed, not only to provide site reliability, cloud and DevOps engineering but a complete technical architecture and technology management over the whole project. Guiding platform engineering, software engineering and DevOps, as well as architecture and UI design, our holistic approach aimed to optimise project performance and functionality in order to deploy a Crypto Trading App for a crypto trading startup.
Empowering Cloud System Excellence: A Customer Success Story
In an era where businesses hinge on the efficiency of cloud-based operations, one pioneering organisation encountered a pivotal challenge: ensuring the secure and uninterrupted functionality of their systems. This obstacle, however, became the catalyst for a groundbreaking transformation in their approach to system management.
How did Mesoform help a highly regulated organisation with technical architecture and engineering?
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.
Market Guide for Application Platforms
Analyst(s):
Anne Thomas, Aashish GuptaSummary
The application platform market is morphing in response to digital business requirements. As Java EE and other three-tier frameworks, such as ASP.NET, fade in relevance, application leaders must build a strategy to shift to alternative platforms that support cloud-native applications.Overview
Key Findings
Commercial 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.
Recommendations
Application leaders responsible for modernizing application infrastructure should:
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.
In the realm of modern software, the discourse surrounding development methodologies is ceaselessly evolving. Below we're going to have a look at an insightful article by Richard Seroter, titled "The Modernisation Imperative: Shifting left is for suckers. Shift down instead", and how it adds an intriguing dimension to the concept of "shifting left" because of the unrealistic burden now being applied to developers. Mesoform will be looking at this to highlight valuable insights that can potentially reshape and refine our approach to software development practices.
Source: Dynatrace
Why am I writing this article?
Recently there’s been a number of big changes to Atlassian Cloud products. A few, even became free or bundled with other price plans. Arguably, all are good products, some you may say are great in their space. As all of this has rolled out, they’ve sent out quite a few emails and one of the recent emails got me thinking about a tutorial I wrote a while back about how to manage DevOps work streams in the context of Agile sprints and Agile software, like Jira and Confluence. This made me want to write an update to this article and see how the idea has stood the test of time and different work environments as I've introduced it for other clients.
Join us in connecting the dots between Platform Engineering, DevOps, and SRE.
We always want to share the knowledge of the best practices and methodologies applicable to software development and delivery, and today is no different!
Join us in connecting the dots between Platform Engineering, DevOps, and SRE. Don’t miss our insightful blog.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern applications, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play a pivotal role in enabling connectivity and functionality. However, as the reliance on APIs grows, so do the security risks associated with them. To address these concerns, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) released the "API Security Top 10" 2023, a comprehensive list of the most critical API security risks. This year they released the 2023 update to those risks, this blog explores the key findings and recommendations.
Explore SRE (Site Reliability Engineering): Your guide to understanding Site Reliability Engineering’s transformative impact on software management.
Wondering how DevOps can transform software development? Discover expert solutions to streamline processes and optimise collaboration.
Some Context
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.
About Mesoform
For more than two decades we have been implementing solutions to wasteful processes and inefficient systems in large organisations like Tiscali, HSBC and HMRC, and impressing our cloud based IT Operations on well known brands, such as RIM, Sony, Samsung and SiriusXM... Read more
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