Cortex 1.4.0 introduces the Generally Available blocks storage engine, marking a significant milestone in reducing the operational complexity and costs of running Cortex clusters at scale by replacing the dependency on expensive NoSQL databases with more cost-effective object storage solutions like S3, GCS, or Azure blob storage. This change, which maintains reliability, scalability, and performance, has led to the successful migration of Grafana Labs' production clusters from chunks to blocks storage. The release also includes notable updates such as Cassandra marked as GA, enhanced support for Redis sentinel and Redis cluster, improvements to the ruler and alertmanager, and the introduction of shuffle-sharding to the store-gateways blocks sharding, which helps to distribute tenant blocks across a subset of store-gateway instances. These advancements will also be integrated into Grafana Metrics Enterprise, providing enterprise-specific features on top of Cortex in future updates.