Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Proof of condition — it’s been around for decades and serves to verify the integrity of everything from material goods to heavy equipment and myriad assets in between. A paper process from the beginning, it has been accompanied by photographs, rubber stamps, and signatures along the way. Still, hard to believe that a quarter way through the 21st century, with ubiquitous mobile device options, so many of these processes continue to reside on clipboards.

Prometheus and Grafana are the default monitoring recommendations across DevOps blogs, Reddit, and Hacker News, and for good reason. Prometheus is open-source and backed by the CNCF, but it’s not actually a complete monitoring system. It’s more of a metric collection engine.

VPC peering can be simple and cost-effective in smaller setups. For growing multi-account platforms, Transit Gateway can offer predictable structure and centralized governance. But that’s not all. AWS VPC peering connects two VPCs directly with no hourly fee — simple and cost-effective at small scale, but it creates an unmanageable mesh as your VPC count grows.

The wrong people got the most attention from Jensen Huang’s comments last week. Huang told the All-In Podcast that he’d be “deeply alarmed” if a $500,000 engineer consumed less than $250,000 in AI tokens annually. Within 48 hours, the discourse collapsed into a compensation debate.

Apache Kafka 4.x eliminates the final barriers to legacy middleware modernization. With KRaft mode removing ZooKeeper dependency and native queue semantics bridging the gap, enterprises can finally transition from point-to-point messaging to event-driven architectures.

For the past few years, the narrative around Artificial Intelligence has been dominated by what I like to call the "magic box" illusion. We assumed that deploying AI simply meant passing a user’s question through an API key to a Large Language Model (LLM) and waiting for a brilliant answer.

On March 24, 2026, the AI open-source ecosystem was impacted by a critical supply chain attack involving the widely used Python package LiteLLM. Attackers compromised the LiteLLM PyPI distribution pipeline and published malicious versions (notably in the 1.82.7-1.82.8 range), embedding a multi-stage payload designed to steal credentials and execute remote code.

Ahead of his participation in techUK’s Digital Transformation from the Edge to the Cloud event, we sit down with Pulsant CTO Mike Hoy to ask him how distributed cloud and edge are reshaping the digital ambitions of UK businesses. Q: So Mike, what are the main issues firms face in designing/redesigning their digital infrastructure in 2026?

Every incident arrives with a payload, and that payload usually tells you far more than whether something broke. It points to which service is affected and how serious the issue looks. It also carries context about which customers are on the receiving end of that failure. The service name, severity, customer context — all of it can feed directly into routing decisions. This guide explores how to read those parts of the payload and use them to route incidents automatically.

Vector Search GA & SQL Enhancements. Aiven for ClickHouse 25.8 is now available as an Early Availability. This Long-Term Support release introduces lightweight projections as secondary indexes, general availability of vector search with binary quantization, correlated subqueries for broader SQL compatibility, lightweight updates for MergeTree tables, and significant performance and data lakehouse improvements.