Last winter, Flexcity — a market leader in electric flexibility — faced an unprecedented challenge: Help stabilize the French national power grid, in the midst of a widespread energy crisis that loomed over Europe. As a byproduct of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy prices in the EU soared in 2022. And France, meanwhile, faced a nuclear power outage that winter that threatened to significantly disrupt its energy supply and increase the risk of electricity shortages.

Kubernetes offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability for containerized orchestration. However, this dynamism can also lead to unexpected costs if you don’t efficiently manage your corresponding cloud resources. In this blog, we’ll outline a series of best practices for Kubernetes cost optimization that will help you keep your infrastructure running smoothly while staying within your budget.

Grafana k6 v0.47.0 has been released, featuring gRPC’s binary metadata support, new authentication methods, and tons of other improvements for Grafana k6 OSS. Here’s a quick overview of the latest features in Grafana k6 v0.47.0, as well as some other exciting updates related to Grafana Cloud k6 and the k6 community.

Grafana is an open source visualization and monitoring solution for correlating and analyzing data from various sources. From time series graphs to heatmaps to 3D charts, it gives you lots of ways to untangle complex datasets. And while that’s incredibly powerful for observability, sometimes you’re looking for something fairly straightforward.

Distributed systems, such as modern microservices-based applications, are highly scalable, but also highly complex. Dependencies and unexpected interactions between services are a common cause of incidents, and these incidents are also notoriously hard to test for. xk6-disruptor — an extension that adds fault injection capabilities to Grafana k6, the open source reliability and load testing tool — can help overcome these challenges.

While we all love open source technology and the community that comes with it, we don’t always have the time or resources to stand up, maintain, update, and troubleshoot a self-hosted stack.

What is Grafana? How do I change the color of a panel set? Where can I find all public dashboards? Who made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs?

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.