FAQs
How quick would a cloud adoption take?
This is a difficult question to answer because every situation is uniquely different. However, because of our ready-made way of working, our guide for a straightforward lift-and-shift migration of two or three similar Linux servers would be 1-2 months. Please bear in mind though, much depends on this, like whether it needs to be an uptime migration and if there is any data involved (and how much). However, choosing Mesoform as your partner for this work, we will also include automation solutions and primary Cloud feature improvements in this migration.
What is a lift-and-shift migration?
This is where we move apps from one provider to another but without any real changes to the app, apart from maybe some configuration changes. We sort of pick up and drop the applications from one server on-premise (or another Cloud) provider onto a ready built one on the different provider. In reality, the way Mesoform works, you will probably be more than just that, and it will likely include improvements to automation, software firewalls, upgrade processes, service availability and security.
What is involved in state of DevOps assessment?
The State of DevOps report is something started a number of years ago by Puppet Labs and was an assessment of how well companies were following the latest best practices of software delivery. It has expanded over the years and is now also ran to different degrees by other companies, however, these are normally surveys which output a score against the industry. Mesoform takes a different approach with our report by offering a personal assessment on what may be missing in your delivery of IT services and what specifically you could look to address as a priority. For the initial assessment, someone from Mesoform will spend time with your tech leaders to assess the current state of how your technology development and operations are performing and provide a high-level set of recommendations for free. If after this you would like to dig deeper and gain further insights and on-going guidance or engineering effort, we provide a more extensive guidance service.
What is the request-based service?
Our most common engagement model involves project-based delivery around a statement of work (SOW) assessment. However, we're passionate about what we do and want businesses of all sizes and positions to be able to leverage our experience in delivering exceptional service at the highest level of industry. So our request-based service makes our team available "on-request" to support your technology team and reduce the burden of context switching causing under-performing developers. We will spend a small amount of time understanding your current DevOps, platform and site reliability engineering status. Once we have this initial engagement set-up, your technology team can simple request our team perform task which would normally take time away from your critical developers who would otherwise be spending time adding critical features on your apps.
How do you manage cyber security?
Mesoform have been advising and engineering best security practices for some of the largest companies around, at highly regulated enterprises and on a massive scale for many years. It is at the heart of everything we do. It is important to ensure your services are released as quickly as possible but it is critical to ensure that they are deployed as securely as possible.
Will you be able to make our app available 24/7/365?
Unfortunately, no one can realistically promise that - and be wary of anyone who does!The IT industry instead talks about the number of 9s your service should expect as its service level objective (SLO). The more 9s the better (e.g. 99.99% uptime). Mesoform will always use the best technologies we believe will give the most availability for your apps. This is still something which is considered on a case-by-case basis because the more 9s you aim for, the more difficult and costly it will become, and sometimes, it may simply be unnecessary. We'll look to implement the best solution for your business based on cost, performance, security and overall user experience.
What is operations-as-a-Service (OaaS)?
Operations is sometimes seen as a big business cost. Essential, but time consuming and as a result, neglected or misunderstood. OaaS is seen as a way to improve overall business operations by leveraging expertise and experience of specialists, as a service, from a third party; and doing it at times, and in ways which work best for you. From Mesoform's perspective, this is technical operations, like site reliability and security.
What do Mesoform do?
Mesoform's experts have been delivering operations engineering solutions for a long time. Over the years, this has focussed into 3 main types of service: site reliability engineering (SRE); DevOps solutions - which is really about service automation and testing; and platform engineering - all of which are fundamentally driven by the best cybersecurity practices from the ground up.
Why would we use Mesoform services when our (full stack) developers already do this work?
Many surveys over the years from companies like Google, IDC, IT Revolution Press and Gartner have found that companies are able to operate more effectively when particular attention is paid, by experts, to how services are deployed, secured, monitored and analysed. This is because each one of these concepts is massive in their own right and require people to focus a lot of time and effort into ensuring they are implemented correctly. When burdening individuals with all this important work, the level of quality and ability to deliver on time, drops drastically. The companies who are doing this best are the ones you expect, Google, AWS, Apple, Microsoft, etc. and they know the way to do this is by shifting down by having dedicated platform engineering, security and SRE teams. However, Mesoform reliase that this can be difficult for many businesses to address, so we make these teams available to you without the major investment in doing it yourself. You just leverage our specialist team and we absorb the big initial and on-going costs.
What does shifting down mean?
Shifting down is a term which has recently come out of Google [link], and is the concept of gaining the most productivity from your development team by engaging with specialist platform engineering, site reliability and security teams to abstract complexities of their specialist areas into easy-to-consume tools and processes which you technology team can adopt into their development lifecycle. An example of this would be providing a simple way to test app deployments against security and compliance policies before changes are even committed to be released.
