Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I'm excited to share that we're launching Braintrust by Cortex, a podcast I've been wanting to create for a while now. After years of building Cortex and working with engineering leaders across industries, I’ve noticed an opportunity for conversations that dig deeper into the daily work of building great engineering teams.

Secure and seamless communication is at the heart of effective patient care. Whether coordinating handoffs, requesting consults, activating code teams, or managing after-hours coverage, clinicians rely on messaging systems that are reliable, fast, and built to protect patient data.

Cloud vendor lock-in threatens agility and raises costs. Discover the high price of proprietary services, egress fees, and technical entrenchment, plus the strategic roadmap to escape. Learn how embracing open standards, Kubernetes, and an exit strategy from day one ensures long-term flexibility and control.

We recently released the 2025 State of Containers and Serverless report, which examines cloud usage data from tens of thousands of Datadog customers. The study shows adoption trends across container orchestration platforms and serverless offerings, and it explores how organizations use those resources to optimize workloads for efficiency, cost, and simplicity.

Organizations that run applications on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) often juggle signals across container and task metrics, logs, and events while they hunt for the change or condition that broke a deployment. This work adds operational overhead and extends incident timelines as teams switch between tools and manually correlate symptoms.

Engineering, operations, and security teams can struggle to make sense of their telemetry data in isolation. Logs, metrics, and events tell what is happening but are often missing critical metadata like who owns what, where it's coming from, or indicators of attack. These gaps in visibility slow down incident response, complicate cost control, and make business or security analytics much harder.

Email deliverability determines whether your messages reach inboxes or disappear without notice. When your domain or mail server appears on a blacklist, communication stops instantly, affecting customers, partners, and revenue. Blacklisting can happen silently, even to legitimate senders. Continuous email blacklist monitoring ensures that issues are detected early, keeping your reputation strong and your communication uninterrupted.

In digital commerce, payment reliability is non-negotiable. The rise of instant payments highlights this need: global instant payment transaction volume reached 195 billion in 2022, with projections to surpass 500 billion transactions by 2027 as more countries adopt faster payment systems. This growing reliance on real-time payment rails raises the stakes for reliability, with any disruption posing major risks to trust and revenue.

Josh Mesout (Chief Innovation Officer at Civo) took the main stage at Civo Navigate London 2025 to deliver a critical message: The AI revolution isn't just coming, it's here, and the way companies are built is changing faster than ever before. His session cut through the hype, delivering hard data on what separates the companies that scale AI from the ones that sink money into failed prototypes. The takeaway is blunt: The biggest threat to your AI ambition isn't the model; it’s your infrastructure.

In Alloy Navigator, AI moves beyond insights to drive real action. Discover how our enhanced intelligence helps you optimize workflows, reduce resolution times, and make smarter decisions faster than ever before.