Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Remember when “going shopping” meant getting in the car? This fall, filling the tank feels like applying for a small loan. U.S. regular gasoline averaged about $4.48 a gallon for the week of September 21, 2026. A round trip to the store starts competing with free shipping. And free shipping never needs a parking spot. That doesn’t tell us how many shoppers will move online this holiday season.

The first number from my local PostgreSQL 16 test was roughly 1,600 statements per second. It looked impressive. It was also the least useful result in the run. The useful part was the workload. It came from queries the demo app had actually sent: the same prepared statements, parameters, reads and writes. A synthetic benchmark tells you how PostgreSQL handles a synthetic workload. It does not tell you whether your migration just broke the UPDATE your app depends on.

Learn how to allocate cloud spend, rightsize Kubernetes safely, stop idle resources, manage commitments, and prevent cost spikes without risking reliability.

Australia’s critical infrastructure landscape has changed significantly. The Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (SOCI Act) has evolved from a framework focused primarily on identifying critical assets and reporting incidents into a broader risk-management and operational-resilience regime. The 2024 reforms reinforced that direction, increasing the focus on the systems, data, and technology dependencies that underpin Australia’s essential services.

Somewhere in the last year, your team's code output went up. Pull requests are opened faster. The backlog of small fixes and routine changes started clearing quicker than it used to. If delivery still feels roughly as slow as it did before, that's what happens when you speed up one part of a process without touching anything downstream of it.

There’s a specific kind of measurement problem worth naming precisely rather than dramatizing: this month we found that our model-routing agent was assigning a token budget to every unit of work, and that budget was noise in the strict sense. Fixing it meant improving a system that’s mostly right, not tearing one down.