Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For years, the cloud migration business case was framed around one comparison: “Will AWS be cheaper than our data center?” That question still matters, but it is no longer where the value is. The 2017-2024 wave of mass migration is largely complete. Most enterprise workloads are already in the cloud - often in a lift-and-shift state: oversized instances, commercial-OS BYOL, on-prem-shaped network designs, and legacy frameworks that block the next step.

When platform providers talk about autoscaling, they usually mean one thing: application autoscaling, adding or removing web instances based on traffic. The pattern is well understood. Define a metric, set a threshold, and let the platform act on it. Most platforms still leave database capacity as a separate, mostly manual problem. Teams either pre-provision for the worst hour of the worst day, upgrade plans on a calendar, or wire together their own scaling logic on Kubernetes or RDS.

Across the United States, data center projects are being stalled, local governments are putting ordinances in place to limit data center buildouts, all because people hate data centers. Due to community pushback, in Q1 2026 alone, over $130 billion’s worth of AI data center projects has been blocked or delayed.

Some memory leaks are straightforward to detect. A process allocates memory, forgets to free it, and grows until something breaks. This was not that kind of leak. This is the story of how Canonical Support helped a global retail organization trace the cause for an unusual memory leak originating in PID 1, the very first process started by the kernel during the system boot sequence. The memory footprint was 10 times higher than expected.