Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Advancing digital transformation in education through Search AI and cloud innovation We’re thrilled to share that Elastic has achieved the AWS Education ISV Partner Competency. This prestigious designation recognizes Elastic as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner that has proven expertise in delivering high-quality solutions that help education institutions support successful student outcomes while protecting security and privacy.

The cloud gave us agility, but it also introduced fragmentation. And in most companies, no one’s fully owning the sprawl. One team deploys a new service in a hurry. Another forgets to shut down a dev environment. Meanwhile, batch jobs run 24/7 on oversized instances. And no one quite knows why your bill is $10K higher this month. The result? A growing source of cost overruns, performance headaches, and operational inefficiencies. This is exactly why cloud workload management is so crucial.

AI spending continues to accelerate. In 2025, experts project that companies will collectively spend about $644 billion on generative AI alone — a whopping 76.4% increase from 2024. This puts it a mere $79 billion behind the public cloud as a whole, signaling the most seismic interval of new infrastructure investment since the dawn of the public cloud.

Data is the lifeblood of businesses the world over, from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise. Making sure that it’s available when you need it, secured for authorized use, and recoverable from faults is vital to operating data platforms, no matter where your business is on its cloud journey. This can only be achieved by putting the right data into the hands of the right people, in a timely way, to make the right decisions about how to manage that platform effectively.

Legacy systems now falter against modern requirements like scalability, security, and emerging technologies such as AI, containers, and microservices. In fact, experts project that by 2026, 90% of current applications will need modernization to remain viable, signaling an urgent call for business leaders to respond. While rebuilding from scratch with the latest technology stack might seem appealing, this approach demands significant time and investment.

We’re entering a new era at CloudZero, and we’re coming in hot. This week, we’re not just launching a new feature. We’re taking a major step forward in our mission to make cloud cost efficiency a seamless, engineer-first, business-aligned reality. My team and I are thrilled to introduce CloudZero Optimize, our smartest, most action-oriented optimization solution yet.

Today’s IT environments are rarely confined to a single data center or a single cloud provider. Enterprises are embracing a mix of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and on-premises hardware to stay agile and competitive. This blended environment is known as hybrid IT infrastructure, and managing it effectively is key to keeping systems healthy, secure, and performing at their best.

At Grafana Labs, we’ve always believed that observability should be open and accessible — that belief extends beyond metrics, logs, and traces to the costs associated with managing observability at scale. That’s why we’re excited to share that we’ve adopted the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification ( FOCUS), a community-driven, open standard for cloud billing data.

AWS and Cloudflare often come up together when teams are building, securing, and scaling web applications. While they originally served different purposes, their offerings now overlap in key areas like content delivery (CloudFront vs. Cloudflare CDN), edge compute (Lambda@Edge vs. Workers), DNS and WAF, and API delivery. In this guide, we’ll explore what each platform does best, when to use one over the other, and see if you can combine both for optimal speed, security, and cost efficiency.