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 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.

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.

In our previous blog, we explored the causes and impacts of the Microsoft Storm-0558 breach—a stark reminder that even global tech giants are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Cybercrime is no longer a distant threat; it's at everyone's digital doorstep. From AI-driven attacks to massive data breaches, cybercriminals are evolving faster than ever.

The good news? You don't need to be a cybersecurity expert to protect yourself. In 2025, staying secure is about being smart, vigilant, and proactive. Below are practical and effective strategies anyone can adopt to safeguard their digital life against modern cyber threats.

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.

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 

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 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?