Cortex v1.1 released with improved reliability and performance

Cortex v1.1 has been released, bringing enhanced reliability and performance through contributions from more than 30 authors across 9 companies. Key features of this release include support for the Prometheus /api/v1/metadata API, allowing Grafana Agent to send metric metadata to Cortex for use in Grafana's Explore view, and the promotion of the Write-Ahead-Log (WAL) feature to production-ready status after extensive testing. The release introduces a significant optimization for regular expression selectors, achieving up to a 100x improvement in query performance by eliminating the need for regular expressions during index lookups in the ingester. Improvements have also been made to the Cassandra chunk storage backend, including TLS host verification and limiting read concurrency, and the query frontend component has been embedded into the single-process Cortex deployment to simplify configuration. Additionally, Cortex has integrated a block-storage approach from Thanos, enhancing the scalability of the read path with the introduction of a store-gateway service, which facilitates horizontal scaling by sharding and replicating blocks across all store-gateway instances. The release reflects increasing interest and development activity in Cortex, supported by the community and leveraged in Grafana Cloud's Prometheus service.