Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Wondering what the big deal is with Black Friday? And why does every business on earth seem to be obsessed with the quasi-holiday? Or are you just looking for great deals? Black Friday has become a sort of global cultural institution. Everyone knows about it, some look forward to it, and a few go crazy for the big day. It may be hard to believe, but Black Friday hasn't always been a thing, and it's actually a relatively recent development.

Incident handling primer to help Google Cloud Platform customers design and practice reliability incident response and minimize business impact.

Most of what runs on a modern platform is built to stay up. Applications serve requests, workers process queues, and managed services keep databases and caches available around the clock. But a meaningful share of the real work does not fit that always-on shape.

For years, moving workloads to the cloud has been driven by scalability, flexibility and the desire to reduce the capital expenditure associated with running a data center. In 2026, however, there is another factor entering the conversation: the rising cost of buying and refreshing physical servers. The question is now whether rapidly increasing hardware prices are enough to push organizations that might previously have refreshed their on-premises infrastructure towards cloud alternatives.

Worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion in 2026, up 47% from 2025, according to Gartner. Yet only 37% of organizations report any earnings impact from AI, McKinsey finds. These AI statistics cover what companies spend, what AI costs to run, and the ROI they're actually getting. That gap between the two headline numbers is the story of AI in 2026.

CloudZero’s own AI Economics Pulse for September found the 75th percentile of its 430-company customer panel crossed 10% of its cloud bill on AI for the first time in August. Gartner’s latest survey found only 22% of organizations have scaled AI successfully and 11% don’t know what their own function spent on it last year. CJ Gustafson showed what that gap looks like on an actual invoice this week.

Internet Performance Monitoring detected the AWS outages before AWS acknowledged them. Learn why independent, outside-in monitoring is critical to faster incident response.