Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI should speed up innovation, not inflate your cloud bill. But today, the biggest GenAI challenge for SaaS teams isn’t model quality; it’s cost. And increasingly, that cost comes from AI cost sprawl. That’s not because anyone is doing something wrong, but because AI operates differently from the cloud services we’ve all spent a decade learning how to manage.

Since launching Harness in 2017, we’ve been on a mission to unlock faster innovation by removing the bottlenecks that slow software engineering teams down. From day one, we believed that the biggest obstacles in engineering weren’t in writing code — they were in everything that followed.

Engineering teams today manage infrastructure spread across multiple clouds and tools. Whether this happened through gradual accumulation or deliberate strategy, the result is the same: complexity that slows teams down. Managing each cloud separately with different tools and workflows is a bottleneck to delivery speed, operational efficiency, and platform reliability.

For most Central IT leaders, tech debt isn't a surprise. It's the silent tax on every roadmap, every quarterly plan, every conversation about why things take so long. Modern cloud application platforms (true PaaS environments) give IT leaders a path to unwind years of accumulated complexity while simultaneously accelerating innovation. You no longer have to tolerate the tax.

You've set up the Cortex MCP and connected it to your AI assistant and IDE. You ask about service ownership, check a Scorecard or two, and it works. You're impressed by how much faster this is than clicking through the web UI. Now you're wondering what else you can do with it. I'm willing to bet we've hit a nerve with that "hypothetical" scenario. The Cortex MCP works exactly as designed, but it's deceptively difficult to know which questions to ask and when to ask them.

HTTP/1.1 is a text-based protocol where the message framing is mixed with its semantics, making it easy to parse incorrectly. The boundaries between messages are very weak because there is no clear delimiter between them. Thus, HTTP/1.1 parsers are especially vulnerable to request smuggling attacks.

We’ve all been there. It’s 2 AM, your phone is buzzing with alerts, and you’re suddenly thrust into an incident war room with a dozen other bleary-eyed engineers. The production environment is on fire, customers are affected, and everyone’s trying to piece together what went wrong. But here’s what makes these moments fascinating from a systems perspective – it’s rarely just one person silently fixing the issue in isolation.