Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Gartner expects worldwide AI software spending to hit $2.59 trillion in 2026, 47% more than organizations spent last year. The dollars are real and growing fast. But most organizations still can't measure the ROI of that spend. The problem has two sides: developers and infrastructure. On the developer side, engineers are using AI to write nearly every line of new code, and leaders have no way to tell whether that spend is producing software that ships.

AI coding tools made code generation faster. Measuring what actually ships is the hard part. Over the last eighteen months, tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, and Windsurf have fundamentally changed how software gets built. AI-generated pull requests are increasing, developers are producing more code than ever before, and workflows that once took hours now happen in minutes. But most organizations struggle to clearly explain what that investment is actually producing.

Our On-call product has a lot of great features: configuring escalation paths, viewing rotas and schedules, requesting cover, etc. However, when framing its reliability, we reduce it down to two critical pieces of functionality: It’s not that we’re happy if only these parts are working, but they are the most important parts. In this post, I'll go into more detail on how we think about their reliability.

Power networks (DSOs, TSOs and generation) are under pressure from every direction. They need to improve reliability and sustainability, deliver real-time customer insight, and meet increasingly stringent regulations. In response, power generation has evolved from a simple centralized model, through to a decentralized model with generation from a mix of diverse sources such as centralized generation from carbon-based, nuclear and renewable generation plants, through DERs even located at people premises.

Most teams first adopt policy as code (PaC) in their delivery pipelines. If something breaks a rule, the system stops it before it goes live. That is useful as it helps catch problems early but in real world environments, the hardest issues to resolve do not come from changes that fail validation. They come from changes that happen later, elsewhere, or outside the pipeline entirely.

Over the past five years, one of the most consistently tracked figures in the UK business technology sector has been the flight from public cloud. Barclays' 2021 CIO survey revealed that 43% of enterprises plan to shift workloads away from public cloud. By 2024, that had grown to 83%. Research for Pulsant in 2025 found that 87% of UK businesses planned to repatriate data away from the public cloud within the next two years.

Alibaba Cloud is a major cloud provider in APAC, offering industry-leading foundational AI models in addition to compute, managed databases, object storage, and Kubernetes through its Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK). Teams choose Alibaba Cloud for its infrastructure availability across Asia Pacific and its managed services. For SREs and platform engineers, that often means running Alibaba Cloud alongside AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.

Every Kubernetes environment accumulates waste over time. Teams overprovision CPU and memory requests to avoid performance risk, run idle replicas to preserve headroom, and leave Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPAs) untouched long after workload behavior has changed. Some of this waste can be addressed at the node level, where Datadog Cluster Autoscaling helps teams rightsize capacity.