Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Splunk isn't bad software. It's genuinely powerful. But in 2026, a lot of engineering teams are asking a fair question: are we getting $300K worth of value out of this? More often than not, the answer is no. We went through 15 alternatives - read the docs, tested where we could, and talked to engineers who made the switch. This is what we found.

At Cortex, our mission is to help engineering organizations deliver reliable, secure, efficient software, faster. With Cortex, teams can standardize against best practices and create a culture of continuous improvement to achieve this. Today, we’re excited to announce a formalized partnership with Semgrep, a leader in modern static analysis and code security.

In 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced plans for an EU Cloud and AI Development Act, prioritizing digital sovereignty amidst growing concerns over data security and privacy. These concerns have been fueled by Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about US surveillance and further intensified by the Trump administration's actions and rhetoric, including its criticism of EU digital regulations and threats to US tech companies.

Numerous best practices help to deliver robust cybersecurity. Adopting these will involve combining many of the technologies already outlined in the previous entry.

Welcome to February’s Cloud Economics Pulse, CloudZero’s monthly look at cloud spend as AI moves from experiment to expectation. Last month, we closed out 2025 with a settling: provider shares locked in, compute softened, and AI claimed more of the mix (big surprise there). January confirmed those patterns weren’t year-end hustle and bustle. They signify a new baseline. Also, the Big Three (AWS, GCP, Azure) barely moved. They’re as entrenched as can be.

Kubernetes and OpenStack are not competitors. They operate at different layers of the stack and are often used together. OpenStack manages cloud infrastructure such as compute, storage, and networking. Kubernetes runs on top of that infrastructure to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications. Teams often compare them as alternatives, but in practice, Kubernetes frequently runs on OpenStack.

Open source cloud storage offers greater transparency and peace of mind that your data is stored safely, as the code that builds that platform is available for everybody to view and verify its security and data handling. With compatibility for popular APIs like Amazon S3, these 7 object storage solutions can handle a wide range of workloads, from backups and archives to data lakes and AI applications, while remaining scalable and cost-effective.

Compare the best enterprise Kubernetes management tools for 2026. From Qovery and OpenShift to Rafay and Mirantis, discover which platform best suits your multi-cluster strategy.

Many organizations approach Autonomous IT with the assumption that adding more tools, more data, or more automation will eventually produce self-governing operations. This assumption creates the illusion of progress. Complexity does not resolve itself when new systems are layered on top of existing ones. In most environments, each new tool adds another interpretation of the truth, which compounds the cognitive load on teams and forces more reconciliation, not less.

Learn the truth about cloud repatriation, the motivations behind it, and whether it’s really happening as much as you think. For years, the cloud has been the default solution for businesses wanting speed of deployment with quick and easy scalability. And while the cloud promises endless resources at your fingertips, a lot of network teams are having the conversation about whether to pull their workloads back out of the public cloud and run them on their own hardware or private cloud again.