Blog
Mantel Group awarded AWS Consulting Partner of the Year ANZ for 3rd time, flags surge in financial services cloud adoption
10 April, 2024 — Mantel Group has been awarded the AWS Consulting Partner of the Year for ANZ for a third time, while flagging a surge in cloud uptake by…
Read More
Mantel Group wins Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for APAC and Google CloudSales Partner of the Year for ANZ
Melbourne, 8 April 2024 — Mantel Group has been named Google Cloud Services Partner of the Year for APAC, and Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year for ANZ in…
Read More
Cloud Adoption: Cutover to AWS and automation of an on-premise Windows workload – Part 2
Cloud Adoption: Cutover to AWS and automation of an on-premise Windows workload – Part 2 Author Mark Matthews, Principal Consultant at CMD Solutions November 14, 2022 Overview In Part 1 of the…
Read More
Customer Central: Revolutionising Managed Services with AWS-Powered Insights and Efficiency
Written by Cass Zara In the dynamic realm of Managed Services and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), the need for a centralised hub to manage customer information and streamline operations became…
Read More
Account switching methods that every cloud engineer needs to know
Introduction Using multi-account strategy is the best practice in AWS, which has been adopted by many organisations. In my observation, a lot of cloud engineers still use Incognito mode to…
Read More
Using Local Zones to Deliver Low-Latency Cloud Performance in Australia and New Zealand
For many years, placement of cloud infrastructure on the AWS cloud was limited to Regions and the associated Availability Zones. This has changed in recent years with the announcement of…
Read More
How to set up a Local Kubernetes Cluster with miniKube for Local Development on MacOS
Setting up a local Kubernetes environment locally can sometimes be a struggle, especially when trying to access workloads to test your application’s functionality. In this article I will show you…
Read More
Using Terraform to create secure IAP tunnels on GCP with conditional IAM policies
Summary This post will detail how to create a secure IAP (Identity Aware Proxy) tunnel to a VM (Virtual Machine) inside a VPC without requiring a public IP address or…
Read More
Troubleshooting 4 common errors when calling Google Cloud Run from App Script
Overview Cloud Run, a serverless compute platform managed by Google, has become a popular way to run containerised apps. Recently, I worked on a project where I had to send…
Read More
Introduction to Linear Regression with BigQuery ML
Overview Recently, Google announced the release of BigQuery ML, an analytics service for building machine learning models using data stored in BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless data warehouse designed for…
Read More
Managing Multiple AWS Accounts with Org-Formation
The Challenge We need to create an AWS Organization with multiple Organizational Units (OUs) and accounts. But that’s not all! It will need to support different types of workloads, be…
Read More
Connecting with EC2 Instance Connect
In a world where everyone talks about serverless and containers, it’s easy to lose sight of improvements to the ‘old’ ways. EC2 instances are still an essential part of many…
Read More
Cloud Adoption – How to easily migrate and automate an on-premise workload – Part 1
Overview We understand every customer and organisation is unique in its own way. The decision an organisation takes to start their cloud adoption and modernisation journey of their environment to…
Read More
Create a Squid Proxy in Google Cloud
Introduction The idea is simple: spin up a Squid Proxy, point your browser to it and use it to give you a fixed, knowable IP address that can be added…
Read More
How CDK simplified ECS Blue/Green deployments
Introduction It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that containers brought a massive change to the industry, where scaling applications moved from scaling servers, to scaling individual container replicas within…
Read More
Securing a Redis Server in Kubernetes
Redis is an open-source, in-memory data structure store or a key-value store used as a database, cache, and message broker. It offers a rich set of features that make it…
Read More
Why the AWS Melbourne Region is a good thing for APRA-regulated businesses
We’re now in the second half of 2022, which means that the new Melbourne Region for AWS can open up any day now, so it’s a good time to have…
Read More
Azure Virtual Desktop 101. Benefits, Typical Architecture and How It Integrates With Nerdio
Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is an enterprise Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution which enables businesses to provision Windows virtual machines, complete with support for Office 365 and other business…
Read More
Detecting Machine Learned Anomalies in Real Time Foreign Exchange Data
Dataflow Financial Services Anomaly Detection For code snippets and paths to files in this blog post, check out our github repository. The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, is a popular…
Read More
Tips & Tricks Of Apple MacOS Instances On AWS EC2
Background The mobile and application development space has seen rapid growth in the last decade. Primarily on iOS and Android platforms – for example, Apple iOS hit 20 million developers…
Read More
Applying the 3 Musketeers pattern to any Terraform deployment
Introduction When it comes to managing various environments utilising an Infrastructure As Code (or IAC) language such as Terraform, there can be surrounding complexities around interoperability. Let’s take the example…
Read More
Why the AWS close-account API is a big deal
Once in a while AWS releases a feature that people have been demanding for a long time, and they did so again when they added the ability to close accounts from…
Read More
Databricks on Azure with Terraform
Overview This post aims to provide a walk-through of how to deploy a Databricks cluster on Azure with its supporting infrastructure using Terraform. At the end of this post, you…
Read More
How To Build An AI Object Detection System with Azure Custom Vision
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not new concepts, you may have heard these buzz words thrown around and mentioned on various products or services. These concepts can…
Read More
EKS Fargate – Github Actions Runners
Running a CI/CD platform using your own runners can be daunting. Not from an implementation perspective, but more so from a scaling perspective. You may be asking, “How will our…
Read More
A No Ops Approach to Auto Healing Dataflow Pipelines with Site Reliability Engineering Principles
Here’s a No-Ops take on applying modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to developing an auto-healing capability for Dataflow pipelines in production on The Google Cloud Platform. In this article,…
Read More
AWS and Patching: Easily keep your instances up to date
This post is part of a series about Cloud Managed DevOps Service at CMD Solutions. This time however, we lift up the curtain a bit and show you how some…
Read More
Why We Dropped ECS in Favour of EKS
When undergoing Application Transformation, choosing a container orchestration solution is something almost every organisation using AWS will have to go through at some point. Having implemented a few Elastic Container…
Read More
Implementing AWS end user computing for Oil Search
Company Overview Secure, scalable defence-in-depth and compliant AWS foundation Scalable VDI solution to support graphics intensive applications Access to high performance computing without location and physical hardware restraints Papuan Oil…
Read More
Making the most of a ‘Lift and Shift’ Cloud Migration
Of all of the seven Rs of cloud migration, “lift and shift”, or “rehost”, is perhaps the easiest to do, yet in many people’s opinion provides the least benefit. As…
Read More
Google Cloud Data Fusion comparison with existing solutions
I’ve always enjoyed seeing tools that make tasks easier. Tools that bring more non-technical users close to specific areas like Machine Learning and Data Engineering, abstracting technical details and allowing…
Read More
AWS IAM and Set Theory: How do permissions in AWS really work?
Do you and your colleagues have trouble keeping your IAM policies up to date? It is possible to write powerful policies that will grow with your changing requirements. We just need a little…
Read More
4 key challenges facing the financial services industry
How embracing the cloud turns threats into opportunities Expectations around customer service have changed dramatically in recent years. Driven by round-the-clock access to services, apps, and tools across work and…
Read More
AWS Lambda vs. ECS vs. EC2: A Comprehensive Performance and Cost Analysis
Written By: Illia Kavaliou (Principal Consultant) Mantel Group One of the most debated topics in the AWS cloud community is how to choose the right compute service for applications…
Read More
Round up from Microsoft Ignite 2023!
Last month, Microsoft held their annual Ignite conference, where a range of new features were announced. In this blog post, We’re going to share just some of the new releases…
Read More
AWS Control Tower APIs at re:Invent 2023
By Colin Andrews re:Invent 2023 had a lot to live up to if it wanted to be compared with the previous year’s slue of AWS Control Tower announcements. While it…
Read More
Gen AI in education: No stuffing the Gen AI cat back in the bag
What the TEQSA review of AI action plans means for universities, institutes and colleges. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency wants to see action plans to address risks…
Read More
State of Data & AI in Financial Services & Insurance
Mantel Group’s ongoing market research and our recently published State of Data & AI 2024 Report reveal four major opportunities and challenges for banking and financial services. 1. Cloud migration…
Read More
Optimisation in Data Science – Mathematical v’s Machine Learning approaches
Written by Alex Essebier, Vivian Mai and Sahil Bahl Most organisations face everyday problems that can be solved faster and more accurately by machines. A prime example is the area…
Read More
How to Evolve Towards a Unified Approach to Data and AI Governance
Written by Dhivya Kanagasingam In today's digital age, data and artificial intelligence (AI) have become the driving forces behind innovation and success for organisations across various industries. However AI, with…
Read More
Utility meter reading on mobile devices using machine learning
Pretraining The pretraining bit was added recently with the release of spaCy 2.1 and allows the use of Language Modelling with Approximate Outputs (LMAO), or training of a transformer for…
Read More
A quick guide to forecasting in Qlik
If you’re looking to conduct some form of forecasting in Qlik, look no further! While Qlik Sense doesn’t quite have an out-of-the-box forecasting function, in most cases a quick and…
Read More
Process mining: Your guide to choosing the right tool for your use-case
How can we dig insights from a flood of information? With every company now leveraging platforms and tools to run their workflows, data shortage is not an issue and it…
Read More
Agile Discovery Phase: The Ultimate Guide
“Discovery” is a term used to describe an introductory phase of a project focused on aligning expectations, exploring assumptions and agreeing on goals and scope. Those in the know often…
Read More
Data Storytelling: what is it, best practice and a framework
There is more data available than ever before but companies are struggling to use it. Data storytelling can help. Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created globally. It’s…
Read More
How to Become a Data Scientist in Australia – Learn from Mantel Group’s experts
Once coined the sexiest job of the 21st century, data scientist has become one of the most popular job fields in recent years, as organisations of all industries have come…
Read More
What is Data Thinking? A modern approach to designing a data strategy
First let’s start with the question: Why do you need to consider a strategy for your data? An abundance of data and computing sources has unlocked tremendous potential. The idea…
Read More
What are the differences between a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer?
The emergence of Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer roles From 2013 to 2019, data science postings on Indeed’s website have skyrocketed 256%, demonstrating a growing demand for data science-related…
Read More
Building a data dictionary for Power BI dashboards with Python
In any business, there will be at least one word or metric that has a different meaning depending on which team you’re talking to. As an analyst, it’s your job…
Read More
Epics: What is an Agile Epic?
Introduction If you use or are interested in an agile approach to delivery, “epic” is a term you want to understand. Epics are a way of organising large items of…
Read More
The 5 Vs of Big Data
What is big data? Big data refers to large, complex data sets often contrived from multiple and new sources. The reason that “big data” has received its own term (after…
Read More
Basic Analytics vs Advanced Analytics
What is “Basic Analytics”? Basic analytics, most commonly just referred to as analytics, focuses on understanding historical data. This understanding is achieved by extracting valuable insights from aggregated, clean datasets.…
Read More
What is a Data Platform?
A data platform is an integrated technological infrastructure that empowers organisations to collect, store, process, manage, analyse, and extract valuable insights from massive volumes of structured and unstructured data. All…
Read More
What Is Databricks And What’s It Used For?
While some people are very familiar with Databricks, others might not know as much. We thought it would be a good idea to break down what Databricks is, explore what…
Read More
How to run a hello world program in Databricks – Part 2
Introduction In our previous article, we have seen how to get onboarded with Databricks and run your first hello world application using Spark. The first step involved creating a community…
Read More
How to run a hello world program in Databricks – Part 1
Let's get started In this post, we're going to get you started on Databricks, but first let's take a quick look at the history of big data space. Spark has…
Read More
Databricks productivity tips and tricks
Databricks is one of the major players in the data space, but some people may still treat it like an optimised hosted service of Apache Spark. It's true that Spark…
Read More
Navigating the data lake using Rust – Part Two
Introduction In part one of this series, we discussed how Delta Lake has become the standard data format for a lakehouse architecture, and how to create and write data to…
Read More
Migrating to Power BI: A User-Centred Approach
Written by Brett Thebault At Mantel Group, we've seen Power BI become the go-to business intelligence (BI) platform for many organisations. This isn't surprising. Power BI capitalises on the familiarity…
Read More
Navigating the data lake using Rust – Part One
Introduction The lakehouse architecture has gained lots of traction in the last few years. The lakehouse simply brings the best of both data warehouses and data lakes. One of the…
Read More
Securing Vertex AI User Managed Notebooks: Lessons Learned
Written by David Liebert and Michael Diender Background I recently provided technical expertise in a team responsible for deploying, configuring and securing Vertex AI User Managed Notebooks (UMNs) in an…
Read More
How to implement Data Vault model
Dimensional modelling, also known as Kimball’s star schema, has long been an industry standard for building a Data Warehouse. Under this approach, we load the data into a staging layer,…
Read More
What is AI?
Let’s clear up one thing: we’re not building the Terminator. AI isn’t a magic spark that will spontaneously occur once you’ve collected enough data. And it’s not something that only…
Read More
The Australian AI Landscape: A Brief Summary
Introduction The good folks at the National AI Centre (NAIC) have recently conducted a survey of business leaders and AI specialists to help provide an assessment of Australia’s growing AI…
Read More
Best AI Coding Assistant Tools in 2023
Written By: Ashish Tripathi, Niharika Kargudri & Jenny Li The recent surge in the popularity of AI Coding Assistant Tools is quite noticeable. This is especially true among developers due…
Read More
What is Data Strategy? It’s more than a technology roadmap
Written By: Christina Evans, Kim Quiñones and Thomas Maas What is a data strategy? A data strategy sets a clear objective of what companies ultimately want to achieve with…
Read More
Our Top 10 Insights from a Year of GenAI Implementation: A Technical Guide
By Katinka Gereb, Arvin Lim, Jim Hortle, James Dunwoody, Alex Essebier and Agnes Abramczyk Introduction Artificial intelligence has evolved significantly in the past year since the introduction of ChatGPT. In…
Read More
The power of AI in your own hands. Is self-hosting your LLM a good idea?
By Stefan Fernandes “In a world where machines are becoming artists, composers, and storytellers, generative AI holds the key to unlocking unparalleled creativity. But as we dive deeper into this…
Read More
Walk before you run: How to get Gen AI working for your business
Brendan Willkinolls - Head of Machine Learning at Mantel Group The power of Generative AI is real. I know, you’re tired of hearing about it. But the fact is, the…
Read More
The Essence of Modern Data Management – Unravelling the Tapestry of Good Data
In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and business, the importance of data management has reached unprecedented heights. The accelerating value and capabilities that can be extracted from good data are…
Read More
Unlocking the Potential: A Guide to Maximising Impact, Realising Value, and Empowering Your Data Science Team
Written by Alex Essebier, Kathryn Collier, Stefan Fernandes, Agnes Abramczyk and Katinka Gereb Data Science Value Data science has become a buzzword in recent years, and with good reason. The…
Read More
React Native: Thoughts from a web developer
What prompted me to start looking in to React Native? As a web application developer, my first attempt of mobile application development was about a year ago, when I decided…
Read More
A Mantel Group approach to tech vitality
Written by Brett Henderson Introduction One of the great benefits of working in a software consultancy is the diversity of problems we are exposed to. The creativity applied by our…
Read More
How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 3
Skills you’ll need, and finding your first job Welcome back to our three-part series about beginning your career in UX/UI Design in 2024. Previously, we touched on different learning journeys,…
Read More
How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 2
Starting your learning journey in UX/UI Design Welcome back to our three-part series about beginning your career in UX/UI Design in 2024. Now that you’ve potentially decided that a career…
Read More
How to start your UX/UI Design Career in 2024 – Part 1
Foreword: It’s 9pm on a Sunday as I sit here, struggling to think of a convincing way to start this foreword. Nothing’s coming to the surface - instead, everything’s just…
Read More
State of On-Device Machine Learning in Android
Written by Bhumil Soni Helly: "Hey, machine learning is changing everything!" Reeaen: "Really? So my coffee machine will finally understand 'extra foam'?" Helly: "Uh, not exactly, but your phone might!"…
Read More
How do I incorporate Design Thinking in Business Strategy?
We are in the midst of a customer-first revolution. When accessing services, people want to run their life with their phones. When purchasing products, they can (and do) leave reviews…
Read More
How to master product adoption using discovery
When thinking about building great products to hit critical mass, the product adoption curve is a popular conceptual tool. However, just because we read left to right, doesn’t mean we…
Read More
Building Live Activities
Today, James Warren presents a tutorial on building Live Activities for iOS 16. Live Activities are a way to display rich and persistent information outside of an app, on the…
Read More
Understanding resource conflicts in Android
During Android development we often have to manage many different resources. At compilation time these resources are all gathered up and merged together into a single package. As per the…
Read More
Replacing legacy code in mobile apps
Our world is always changing. What worked in the past might not work now, or in future situations. Over time our needs will change, and we will need to adapt…
Read More
Scoping out Design Agencies? You deserve better
The most common pitfall with design agencies is the business focus on sales operations over the design process. Before exploring the various drawbacks from this pitfall, it’s worth understanding the…
Read More
An Apple a day: How iOS16’s medication features open the door to better prescription management experiences
With the recent announcement of iOS 16’s new Medication features, a world of possibility is opening up that could enable simpler and more streamlined experiences in an area that has…
Read More
What is Design Thinking? How to use Design Thinking – inform creativity and innovation in solving problems
First up, what is Design Thinking? Unfortunately, there are multiple ways to define design thinking, which can cause a bit of a headache! For many designers it is a creative…
Read More
The key ingredients to building my confidence
I saw a quote on linkedin the other day that said “Be the leader you never had”. This really resonated with me as I am becoming a leader at Pretzel…
Read More
3 key skills of a human centred designer
"Human centred design is defined as a creative problem-solving approach that focuses on generating solutions that are based on meeting the needs of the people we’re designing for" - (IDEO).…
Read More
What is Human centred design? An easy to understand explanation, finally!
What is human-centred design? Human-centred design starts with the people involved, their goals, their needs and what makes them happy, and not so happy. Human-centred design is an approach to…
Read More
My Journey from Chemical Engineering to Design
“Design and Chemical Engineering”, when you say those two things together it sounds like you are comparing the sun and the moon, chicken soup and raspberry slushies, Pepsi and Coke…
Read More
Thinking with Leaders – Resilient Leadership
I was recently invited to sit on a panel to talk about Resilient Leadership hosted by Google. It was a great panel with Aireen Omar (Air Asia) and Ruma Balasubramanian…
Read More
How I got a new career in Design Thinking and Technology during COVID
Being new to the human centred design industry, I started working on a few voluntary projects, did some freelance work and then finally landed a full time role in a…
Read More
Reveal, reveals a whole new look
Melbourne AU, 2 June 2021 Mobile app developer Itty Bitty Apps, the brains behind the leading app debugging tool Reveal, today released v29 of the professional iOS developer’s best friend.…
Read More
Someone should build that
As developers, most of us are sensitive to aspects of our day-to-day that could be improved. Most of the time, there turns out to be an easy way to satisfy…
Read More
Conditional Navigation with Navigation Compose
In this post, I’m going to describe some of the pitfalls of Jetpack Navigation in Compose, and how to avoid them. Understanding these problems and finding solutions has been quite…
Read More
The power of SDKs to drive growth
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. - Metcalfe's Law Metcalfe’s law of network effects is what drives the exponetial growth…
Read More
iOS for the uninitiated – how to get started
After having completed most of a computer science degree I did what any reasonable person would do. I dropped out and tried to figure out how to be an iOS…
Read More
Smooth Integration: SDKs for the BNPL revolution
The market for buy now, pay later (BNPL) is booming. The digital shift of 2020 combined with a surge in consumer interest in better understanding and controlling spending, has pushed…
Read More
Build Better Apps
Smartphones and tablets are an integral part of our everyday lives. They help us to connect, to capture and relive precious moments with our loved ones, and to carry out…
Read More
Introducing our iOS UI kit
We built an iOS 16 UI kit for Figma🎉 But why build this kit, and what makes it stand out from the other iOS 16 UI kits in the community?…
Read More
Continuous Delivery at ANZ Plus
Today, I will show how we do continuous delivery with the new ANZ Plus app, and how we go from developers opening a pull request to having the app out…
Read More
Unlocking new realities: What businesses need to know about visionOS and Vision Pro
Apple has a knack for keeping us on our toes and changing the face of consumer technology. We've seen it time and time again, from the iPod to the Apple…
Read More
Unveiling the Future: GitHub Universe 2023 Announcements
Introduction GitHub Universe 2023 marked a thrilling culmination of groundbreaking innovations that will reshape the coding landscape, elevating developers' capabilities to new heights. Amidst an array of exciting updates, one…
Read More
Tech radar – Discover emerging tech trends
Written by Sangeeta Vishwanath What is our Technology Strategy? Which Technology areas are we investing in? These are questions we explore regularly within the Mantel Group team, and the Mantel…
Read More
A Tour of OAuth Standards
Written by Brett Henderson The previous blog Entitlements In Context provided some context around how IAM (Identity and Access Management) fits into typical DigIO solutions. It made some mention of the OAuth…
Read More
LambdaTest vs BrowserStack vs SauceLabs: Testing Tools Analysis
The Need For Cross-Browser Testing Tools Imagine navigating the digital world without the worry of web and mobile application compatibility issues. Sounds blissful, right? Thanks to cloud-based, cross-browser testing tools…
Read More
Pros and Cons of Flutter – From an App Engineer
Overview Cross Platform vs Native development is not always a straightforward consideration. I’ve been involved in my fair share of heated debates over what is best. As a passionate iOS…
Read More
Using Kafka with Go: A Tech Assessment
Written by Song Xue There’s an increasing demand for Kafka across the Mantel Group brands in client projects. Java, Kotlin, and Scala are the default languages for writing applications that interact…
Read More
What is Continuous Assurance?
By Phil Massyn One of the major challenges organisations are facing today is providing transparency into their current security posture which is able to provide both granular detail in addition…
Read More
Unravelling Adversarial AI: A New Frontier in Cybersecurity
By Brendan Wilkinolls The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought about revolutionary changes in virtually every sector of society. AI offers innovative solutions and uncovers new possibilities, leading to…
Read More
Cyber security with a purpose (why compliance /= security)
Where it all began In the 1980s a new age of technology was dawning, as personal computers started to move from laboratories and specialist engineering uses to something that was…
Read More
An Introduction to Amazon Security Lake
In today's fast-paced digital world, cyber threats are on the rise exponentially and are a constant stress point for organisations. Remediating any security incidents require logs from different resources and…
Read More
Integrating Crowdstrike Falcon logs with Amazon Security Lake
Organisations can gain access to a wealth of information, including system detections, vulnerabilities, and configurations, by integrating third-party services such as CrowdStrike's Falcon Query API with security lakes, which have…
Read More
The difference between Cybersecurity & Information Security
Information Security vs Cybersecurity The terms Information Security and Cybersecurity are often used in the media on a daily basis and when words such as attack, threat and breach are…
Read More
GopherConAu 2023 – Key Takeaways & Thoughts
Authors: Niharika Kargudri, Thara Supasiti, Victor Chan, Kristabel Wong, Roman Gurevitch, Broderick Westrope From the 8th of November to the 10th of November, a few of us from Mantel Group…
Read More
Harbouring Innovation: SXSW Sydney, AI and Divergent Thinking
By Mitchell Davis Why SXSW Sydney? Collating every part of my SXSW Sydney seems like a monumental undertaking, but it only feels right to start with the “My Deal” program,…
Read More
