Grafana Labs has transitioned its focus from Cortex to Grafana Mimir, an open-source long-term storage solution for Prometheus, although they continue to support and develop Cortex, a Prometheus-compatible time series database. Cortex is designed for high scalability and availability, enabling centralized aggregation of metrics from multiple Prometheus instances across geographically distributed Kubernetes clusters. It supports durable long-term storage using various cloud services, aiding in capacity planning and trend analysis, and offers multitenancy to reduce operational overhead. Recent enhancements include a single-process architecture for ease of use, a parallelizing query engine that significantly improves query latency, and support for highly available Prometheus pairs to enhance redundancy. Despite challenges in continuous deployment due to its stateful nature, Grafana Labs is committed to regular updates and backward compatibility, with plans to release a 1.0 version with features like a write-ahead log for increased durability.