Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At a previous company, we had over 100 microservices. I’d make what seemed like a simple change to one service and deploy it, only to discover it broke something completely unrelated. A change to the user service would break checkout. An update to notifications would break reporting. We spent more time fixing unexpected bugs than shipping features. The problem was our test scenarios were too simple.

If you’ve ever opened your Google Cloud bill and felt confused, you’re not alone. Costs in GCP can spike up fast. One project here, a few APIs there, until the total looks nothing like what you expected. That’s because Google Cloud pricing is built for flexibility. You pay for what you use, across dozens of services, each with its own rules, discounts, and data charges. It’s robust, but also easy to lose sight of what’s driving your spend. The good news?

Welcome to CloudZero’s inaugural Cloud Economics Pulse! This is our monthly snapshot of how cloud spend is evolving across providers, services, and emerging AI workloads. Each month, we’ll surface key trends, highlight where the money’s moving in cloud spend, and offer practical insight to help FinOps and cloud cost teams stay on top of things. October — and preceding months — shows a turbulent stretch for cloud economics.

Harness surveyed 500 security practitioners and decision makers responsible for securing AI-native applications from the United States, UK, Germany, and France to share findings on global security practices. The State of AI-Native Application Security 2025 dives deep into AI visibility and the changing landscape of security vulnerabilities. If 2024 was the year AI started quietly showing up in our workflows, 2025 was the year it kicked the door down.

Managing team access in Grafana can be tricky—especially as your organization grows. That’s where Grafana access groups (also known as Limited Access Groups in Hosted Graphite) come in. They allow you to define groups of dashboards and restrict which team members can access them. If you’re using Hosted Graphite with Grafana dashboards, this feature helps you organize teams, maintain data privacy, and simplify access control—all while giving users just the permissions they need.

Harness has modernized Commitment Orchestrator to give FinOps teams a clearer, faster, and more intelligent way to manage cloud commitments. The redesigned experience unifies visibility across RIs, Savings Plans, on-demand, and Spot usage, with expanded metrics and streamlined workflows for smarter decisions. Built on a foundation for AI-powered insights, it helps teams optimize spend with greater confidence and less manual effort.

In 2025, DevOps continues to grow and change quickly, helping teams deliver software faster and more securely. But as systems become more complex with microservices, cloud platforms, and AI-driven tools, new challenges arise. Teams now need to balance speed with security, manage too many tools, control rising cloud costs, and still maintain high-quality software. This is where Application Performance Monitoring (APM) becomes essential.

Everyone's talking about how AI is transforming software development. Teams are shipping more code, deploying more frequently, and getting features to market faster than they could a year ago. The productivity gains are real. But we kept hearing a different story from engineering leaders. Yes, velocity is up. But incidents are climbing, resolution times are getting longer, and code review processes are struggling to keep up.