Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What’s in this article? Modern enterprise workloads are demanding more from IT infrastructure than ever before. AI platforms, advanced analytics, virtualisation clusters and high-performance computing (HPC) environments all require significantly more compute power than traditional business applications. Many organisations are discovering that their existing on-premise facilities were never designed for these demands.

If you pull cost data from a CloudZero Snowflake Data Share, a request for just a few days of data could be surprisingly slow and expensive. Because of how the data was stored, Snowflake had to read far more than the days you asked for. You paid for that in query time and credits.

Hosting an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server on Upsun lets AI IDEs like Cursor, Codex, Claude Code and Windsurf reach real infrastructure context (database schemas, service logs, environment variables), closing the gap between local coding assistants and your cloud environment.

‍ For more than a decade, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has transformed how engineering organizations build and operate systems. Infrastructure became programmable, provisioning became repeatable, and configuration became version-controlled. Teams gained the ability to automate environment creation, enforce policy consistently, and scale infrastructure operations far beyond what manual processes could support.

Some memory leaks are straightforward to detect. A process allocates memory, forgets to free it, and grows until something breaks. This was not that kind of leak. This is the story of how Canonical Support helped a global retail organization trace the cause for an unusual memory leak originating in PID 1, the very first process started by the kernel during the system boot sequence. The memory footprint was 10 times higher than expected.