The landscape of AI and compute-intensive applications underwent a significant transformation with Google Cloud's latest innovation. On August 21, 2024, Google Cloud launched the public preview of Cloud Run with GPUs, a feature that integrated the power of NVIDIA L4 GPUs into the serverless Cloud Run platform.
This new offering is more than just an incremental upgrade—it represented a major advance in how developers could harness the power of AI inference and handle resource-intensive tasks with greater efficiency on Google Cloud.
Tired of AI responses that miss the mark? Struggling to get the results you need? The key to unlocking AI's true power is in your hands – through crafting the perfect prompt. Mastering this skill will revolutionise how you brainstorm, create, and tackle challenges.
At Mesoform, we're passionate about AI's potential to transform your workflow and creative process. We're here to guide you on your AI journey, empowering you with the knowledge and tools to harness its full capabilities. Get ready to unleash new levels of productivity, creativity, and innovation in your business.
Bridging the Gap: DevOps, SRE, and the Cybersecurity Imperative
The tech world is a fast-paced arena, and staying ahead of the curve demands seamless collaboration. Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams have long recognised the power of joining forces in a DevOps approach. Now, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) adds another layer to this dynamic duo, with a laser focus on building reliable and scalable systems. But in this age of digital transformation, there's a third player demanding equal attention: Cybersecurity.
Mesoform's State of the Union report dives deep into this interconnected landscape. We're not just talking about tools and technologies – this report explores the people and the cultures that make these systems tick. From how teams are structured and how they communicate to the very foundations of their technology choices, we'll uncover the hidden links between DevOps, SRE, and the ever-present need for security.
If you're in the IT world, you've probably heard whispers of "platform engineering". But is it just another buzzword, or is it something more? Let me tell you, this is one trend you don't want to miss.
The IT industry has long sought a universal, cost-effective solution for deploying apps and cloud services, one that not only conserves time and resources but also expedites project delivery, elevates service reliability, and strengthens security from inception. Historically, these objectives often appeared to be at odds with one another.
However, with the introduction Mesoform's Athena Developer Platform, we're poised to transform the paradigm of cloud management. Athena champions the principles of "Shifting Down", redefining how organisations approach cloud deployment by empowering developers with greater control and autonomy; and improving on your ability to shift left.
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?
This blog is on the importance of NGINX and will discuss how Mesoform implemented it despite facing challenges. Making use of multiple technologies to secure your IT.
This blog is on the importance of automated compliance enforcement and will discuss how Mesoform implemented it despite facing challenges. Making use of multiple technologies to secure your IT.
This blog is on the importance of having a centralised SIEM and will discuss how Mesoform created it despite facing challenges. Making use of multiple technologies to secure your IT.
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:
This episode's thoughts on Google Kubernetes Engine and Scrum for DevOps Teams:
- Google Cloud GKE Autopilot for improve security at reduced cost
- Getting more done in your DevOps team sprints
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
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.
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.
This blog is on the psychological influence of good DevOps and SRE practices: building stronger teams and enhancing productivity
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.
What we mean by "operations," has changed over the years and some ambiguity has resulted from the pace of change. I'd like to discuss some of these changes.
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.
Where did it all start
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?
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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