Gareth Brown

Gareth Brown

The recent cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer and the Co-op have exposed a critical weakness in the UK retail sector-one that goes far beyond firewalls and antivirus software. These incidents weren’t simply IT failures; they were the result of outdated assumptions about how modern digital infrastructure should be secured.

From a platform engineering perspective, these attacks offer a stark reminder that cybersecurity must be embedded into every layer of the technology stack by default, by policy, and by design.

As we navigate 2025, the pace of technological change continues to accelerate. Enterprises face mounting pressure to adopt emerging technologies — from AI agents to hybrid computing — while maintaining stability, compliance, and a positive developer experience.

The latest Gartner Strategic Technology Trends for 2025 outline a compelling future, centred around three core themes:

  1. AI imperatives and risk management
  2. New frontiers of computing
  3. Human-machine synergy

These trends aren’t just speculative forecasts — they represent very real pressures and opportunities that IT leaders must now plan for. Yet, for many organisations, the real challenge lies not in recognising these trends, but in implementing them at scale.

As a platform engineering, myself, I wanted to look into how we, and perhaps more specifically, Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) could help ease adoption of these new technologies. I can say personally that we’ve certainly seen positive impact with AI and blockchain infrastructure.

Wednesday, 26 February 2025 12:54

Log Analytics with BigQuery and Looker

In today’s data-driven world, leveraging the full potential of your cloud data is essential. This blog delves into the strategic advantage of streaming Google Cloud audit logs into BigQuery and visualising them through Looker Studio. Discover how this powerful combination can unlock deeper insights, fortify security monitoring, and transform raw log data into actionable intelligence that drives smarter, more informed decision-making.

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!

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 projected to be 3x (current size being 30,000 developers working on 4,000+ projects), 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.

 

DevOps was supposed to revolutionise software development with faster releases, improved collaboration, and higher-quality applications. But for many organisations, the reality is far from ideal. Teams often face a tangled web of tools, inconsistent processes, and bottlenecks, leading to frustration and inefficiency.

The root of the problem? Common DevOps anti-patterns that derail even the most well-intentioned teams. The solution? Our Athena Developer Platform, a powerful tool designed to eliminate these pitfalls, streamline operations, and empower developers to achieve more.

 

Summary

As we discussed in the previous blog, API versioning isn’t as simple as having running different services to handle the different versions, whereby each service processes each version independently of the other. With Kubernetes, your controller watches the state of an object in etcd, that stored object is versioned to a single value (i.e. only 1 version is ever stored at a time), and when you set-up a watch on the resource whichever version you ask for is the version you will get.

Therefore, when writing a k8s operator, there are a set of requirements and conventions we need to be aware of to ensure that we’re able to progress the software development lifecycle of the API specification and the controller versions in a robust manner.

 

Tuesday, 19 November 2024 16:47

Technology Musings Episode 10

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?

In today’s digital landscape, cybersecurity is paramount. At Mesoform, we work with clients across various industries to help them navigate the complexities of security when selecting productivity suites. Choosing between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is one of the biggest decisions organisations make in this area, with each platform offering its unique approach to protecting data, user identities, and systems. In this blog, we’ll dive into the key differences in security between each platform and analyse how they handle threats and support today’s security best practices.

In the rapidly evolving world of cybersecurity, even industry giants can falter. The recent Storm-0558 security breach at Microsoft underscored the growing complexities of defending against sophisticated cyber threats. As artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates the evolution of cyberattacks, 2025 must be the year organisations prioritise strengthening their cybersecurity frameworks.

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About Mesoform

For more than two decades we have been implementing solutions to wasteful processes and inefficient systems in large organisations like TiscaliHSBC and HMRC, and impressing our cloud based IT Operations on well known brands, such as RIMSonySamsung and SiriusXM... Read more

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