Cortex v1.1 has been released, enhancing reliability and performance with significant contributions from over 30 authors across nine companies. This release introduces support for Prometheus's /api/v1/metadata API, marking the Write-Ahead-Log (WAL) feature as production-ready after thorough testing. A notable optimization significantly accelerates queries involving regular expression selectors with multiple OR conditions, inspired by Prometheus's TSDB. Improvements to the Cassandra chunk storage backend include TLS host verification and controlled read concurrency, while the query frontend component has been embedded into single-process deployments to streamline configuration. The integration of Thanos's block-and-object-storage approach, including chunk data caching, improved memory usage, and blocks sharding via the new store-gateway service, enhances scalability by enabling horizontal scaling of block index queries. As interest in Cortex grows, users are encouraged to explore the release and consider Grafana Cloud for a managed service experience, with additional resources available through webinars and Grafana's platforms.