At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, Grafana Labs engineer Marco Pracucci and Hashicorp's Thor Hansen discussed advancements in scaling Prometheus with Cortex, focusing on integrating Thanos technology to enhance Cortex's storage capabilities. The presentation outlined a new storage engine within Cortex, which reduces operational costs while maintaining performance and scalability. They introduced the experimental Cortex blocks storage, which eliminates the need for a separate index store by utilizing Prometheus TSDB per tenant, thereby storing all data in an object store. This approach leverages Thanos' principles, incorporating components like a compactor and store-gateway to manage and optimize data storage and retrieval. The talk highlighted Cortex's evolution, including its microservices architecture, single binary mode, and improvements in query performance through parallelization and caching strategies. The session emphasized the experimental nature of the blocks storage, its ongoing development, and the expectation of stabilization in the near future. The team also discussed future plans, such as optimizing query performance, implementing shuffle sharding for scalability, and collaborating with the Thanos community on data deletion features.