Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

‍ For more than a decade, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has transformed how engineering organizations build and operate systems. Infrastructure became programmable, provisioning became repeatable, and configuration became version-controlled. Teams gained the ability to automate environment creation, enforce policy consistently, and scale infrastructure operations far beyond what manual processes could support.

Hosting an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server on Upsun lets AI IDEs like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code and Windsurf reach real infrastructure context (database schemas, service logs, environment variables), closing the gap between local coding assistants and your cloud environment.

If you pull cost data from a CloudZero Snowflake Data Share, a request for just a few days of data could be surprisingly slow and expensive. Because of how the data was stored, Snowflake had to read far more than the days you asked for. You paid for that in query time and credits.

There is a particular kind of incident every SRE team is familiar with. A common component of your stack, say your Redis database, starts misbehaving. Someone spends two hours tracing it back to a connection pool exhausted by a misconfigured client, the fix goes in, and everyone moves on, for today. The following Tuesday it happens again, and whoever is on call investigates it from scratch, because the person who solved it last week is asleep, on vacation, or working somewhere else now.

For most IT leaders, multicloud didn't arrive as a decision. It arrived as a fait accompli. A team chose AWS for one workload. Azure came in through a Microsoft enterprise agreement. A SaaS acquisition brought its own cloud dependencies. A DR requirement pointed to a second region with a different provider. Nobody declared a multicloud strategy; the organization just became one. Today, 87% of organizations run a multicloud strategy, balancing an average of 2.6 public cloud providers simultaneously.