Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Google Cloud Functions is Google's serverless functions product, renamed Cloud Run functions in August 2024 and folded into the Cloud Run platform. You write event-driven code, Google runs it, and you pay per request, per vCPU-second, and per GiB-second after a free tier of 2 million requests a month. The catch: per-invocation billing scales your mistakes exactly as efficiently as it scales your product.

Somewhere in most production setups there is a container that stays awake all week to do one job on Friday. Maybe it re-indexes a database. Maybe it runs a batch report, or a data migration that only matters at month end. Either way, the resources are billed for seven days. Task containers close that gap. They are ephemeral, API-triggered containers that spin up inside an Upsun Cloud environment, run exactly one command, and remove themselves when that command exits. Nothing sits idle between runs.

Microsoft Azure Monitor is an essential platform service for monitoring Azure resources. It provides valuable telemetry, logs, metrics, and alerts that help administrators understand the health of their cloud infrastructure. For organizations running Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Azure Monitor is usually the first monitoring service they deploy.

Your pipeline works. The build passes, the image lands in the registry, and the job turns green. Then someone asks why production still runs the old version, and you spend the next two hours determining whether the problem is a deployment configuration, a runner, an approval rule, or the runtime itself. That is the wrong-tool tax.

CUR 2.0 is generally available and on by default, so every AWS connection you make now starts with the richest billing data AWS offers. That richness is important. CUR 2.0 carries AWS caller identity, which is what puts Bedrock and other AI spend on the role that drove it instead of leaving it as one number in your bill. It also populates AWS Account Name automatically. Both of those are yours the moment the connection is live. Getting there is a single step now.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise pricing is $39 per user per month, and since June 1, 2026, each seat includes $39 in monthly GitHub AI Credits, pooled across your whole organization and consumed by token usage at per-model rates. The seat price is fixed. The bill is not: usage beyond the pooled credits is charged on top, which is why the real Enterprise question in 2026 isn't the price per seat. It's your engineers' token consumption.

What's in this article? For over a decade, the enterprise IT narrative was simple: move everything to the public cloud. Yet as enterprise architectures have matured, many UK technology leaders have discovered that hyperscale cloud environments do not always deliver the outcomes they expected. The promises of seamless scalability and lower total cost of ownership often come with trade-offs that become more apparent over time.

Task containers are now generally available on Upsun Cloud, giving you a place to run AI agents alongside the rest of your application. The agent runs as a container inside your Upsun Cloud project, next to the app it works on, with the same access to your environment and data as everything else deployed there. The lifecycle is the part that's new: it fits how agent workloads behave instead of forcing them to pretend to be servers. A few things up front: This is a hands-on guide.

Control Plane is now a technology partner of Akamai Cloud. You can add regions from Akamai Cloud to your Global Virtual Cloud in Control Plane. And by leveraging Control Plane’s Universal Cloud Identity, workloads running on Akamai Cloud regions can still consume any service of AWS, GCP, or Azure with no credentials embedded in the workload.