Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Managing IT for Witherslack Group does keep me up at night sometimes. Keeping our data secure is an ongoing challenge. When I say our data is sensitive, I mean a breach could genuinely destroy lives. We care for some of the UK's most vulnerable children: young people who have experienced sexual exploitation, kids whose parents cannot know their location, children from backgrounds most people could not imagine.

Every December, Spotify launches its infamous Wrapped campaign, which sends millions of users into a frenzy about their listening habits. They become pseudo data scientists and analyze how frequently they listen to their guilty pleasures, their kids' terrible playlists, or the music they love that nobody else has heard of yet. We love this tradition, so we're bringing it to Cortex.

Happy Holidays, and happy almost new year from us at CloudZero! November is always a busy time! In case you missed the headlines, here’s what happened last month in relation to cloud and AI costs: Get the details below!

The AI landscape today feels a lot like the early days of the cloud: exciting, fast-moving, and completely fragmented. Every week, engineering teams are experimenting with dozens of large language models (LLMs) from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Meta, and beyond. They’re tweaking prompts, testing model performance, swapping context windows, and even running multiple models in parallel to figure out which one works best for each unique use case.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we execute our everyday operations. AI assistants are incredibly intelligent; they can write code, explain complex concepts, and answer any question you throw at them. However, they can't execute actions on their own. If you ask your AI assistant to “create a backup of my database,” it may provide you with clear instructions, run the CLI commands directly or in some cases, even trigger actions through connected agent workflows.

We’re giving Bitbucket a fresh new look and more streamlined navigation as part of Atlassian’s broader visual system journey. Teams and workflows have improved, and Bitbucket is changing with them. Our goal is to make it faster to find your work, clearer to understand what’s happening, and more enjoyable to use every day—without disrupting what you already know and love. This update aligns Bitbucket with Atlassian’s modern, unified design, and will launch in early 2026.

For many engineering teams, an incident is a chaotic, all-hands-on-deck event. Once the incident is resolved, everyone returns to their regular work and the valuable lessons from the incident are often lost. The result is a cycle of repeated failures and engineer burnout, where incidents are something to be survived, not learned from. At Cortex, our mission is to help engineering organizations build a culture of continuous improvement.

Running Kubernetes at scale almost always means paying for more compute than you need. To protect reliability, platform and application teams typically overprovision nodes early in development and keep scaling up as they add features and workloads. They are often reluctant to move to smaller or different instance types without a clear picture of how those changes will affect performance or availability. The result is a fleet of underutilized nodes that silently inflate your cloud bill.