Cortex, an open-source, horizontally-scalable, and highly-available clustered Prometheus implementation, released its first official version under the guidance of Chris Marchbanks from Splunk. Although Grafana Labs, which initially led Cortex's development, has shifted focus to Grafana Mimir, the project continues to thrive with contributions from over 50 people and usage by companies like EA, Aspen Mesh, Mayadata, and Gojek. Cortex has transitioned to versioned releases to better accommodate user needs, moving away from its previous continuous deployment model. The project, now part of the CNCF Sandbox, plays a crucial role in accelerating the development of Grafana's log aggregation system, Loki, and continues to scale significantly, handling millions of samples per second. Future plans include enhancing Prometheus's TSDB integration in Cortex for easier on-premise deployment, improving cluster scalability, and adapting Cortex's PromQL acceleration techniques for use with Prometheus and Thanos.