Here at Grafana Labs, when we’re building integrations for Grafana Cloud, we’re often thinking about how to help users get started on their observability journeys. We like to focus some of our attention on the different technologies you might come across along the way. That way, we can share our tips on the best ways to interact with them while you’re using Grafana products.

Late last year, SUSE completed their acquisition of Rancher Labs, and in doing so, has had to make some decisions on their product roadmap and ongoing support commitments. SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE’s software-defined storage product based on Ceph, doesn’t appear to have made the cut. According to their support pages, it is scheduled for End of Life with milestones in January 2021 and 2022.

With containerized workloads now the norm, and Kubernetes the chosen method for orchestration, new ways of operating and managing the underlying infrastructure have emerged. In this Kubernetes-first world, the goal is to not have to think about managing compute or storage.

Just how smart is your storage management? Storage is one of the most promising ways to shift from the "more is better" philosophy to the "work smarter" philosophy. What do I mean by that? Historically, IT managers who needed more storage responded in the most obvious way: they bought more. Then they deployed it, integrated it, and waited until the problem recurred.