In Level Up’s experience, there are two kinds of teams who oversee cloud cost management: the ones who are constantly refreshing their billing dashboards, and the ones who already know how the story ends this month, because they wrote the FinOps script.
We’re helping our clients become the latter kind.
These teams don’t debate downsizing autoscaling groups, or argue about tag hygiene, and then hope for the best. Instead, they reverse-engineer the organization’s long term, strategic financial goals into how they are operating hybrid IT day-to-day. And they steer their ongoing IT investments where they really count, turning “accidental cloud spend” into clear and predictable business value, often before Finance even starts asking questions. And one of our Red Hat® customers’ very best tools? A still somewhat under-appreciated program called Hybrid Committed Spend (HCS).
Beyond the Billing Page: What HCS Really Is
You won’t find it shouting at you from your AWS® bill. You won’t see it being celebrated with an emoji in your cloud console. But Red Hat’s HCS program has quietly become one of the most effective tools in the modern cloud cost manager’s kit.
At its core, HCS is a way to basically double-count your Red Hat purchases, both toward your cloud provider’s committed spend (like AWS EDP aka PPA, Azure® MACC, or Google® CUD), and toward your Red Hat drawdown. One move. Two buckets. Deduplicated. Discounted. Done.
But HCS isn’t just a discount method. It’s a philosophy of cloud spend:
- Deploy what matters.
- Track it automatically.
- Make every dollar echo.
The Most Successful Red Hat Clients We Know? They Always Double-Dip Cloud Spend Whenever They Can
Unfortunately, some Red Hat customers running in public clouds are still treating their committed spend agreements like a sunk cost. The most successful ones though? They view commit as a strategic instrument. And they know that Red Hat’s Hybrid Cloud Console now does the hard part for them: automated aggregation, secure hyperscaler reconciliation, and zero-latency drawdown insight. No more spreadsheet acrobatics. No more wondering what’s going to count toward either agreement. These Red Hat HCS customers also know what many miss: HCS isn’t just a Red Hat rebate program. It’s a cloud cost translator. It lets finance, IT operations, and procurement all speak a common language, and hit their individual departmental budget targets without stepping on each other’s toes.
What It Takes to Unlock HCS
If you’re already using Red Hat in the cloud (e.g., RHEL, Ansible, OpenShift) and have a committed spend deal with Amazon Web Services®, Microsoft Azure®, or Google Cloud®, then you’re halfway there.
What’s left?
- Sign a Hybrid Committed Spend agreement with Red Hat.
- Hook up the spend tracker via the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.
- Confirm you’ve got HCS viewer permissions.
Boom. You’re no longer just spending public cloud budget, you’re compounding it.
Bring Your Own Subscription, But Leave Any Baggage Behind
In the race to hybrid cloud, most teams aren’t starting from scratch—they’re often bringing their existing IT investments with them. That’s where BYOS (Bring Your Own Subscription) comes in.
BYOS allows customers to apply existing Red Hat subscriptions (like RHEL, Ansible, or OpenShift) to public cloud workloads, without repurchasing them through the cloud marketplace. It’s the right move when you’ve already invested in mission-critical software and want flexibility on where it runs: on-prem, in AWS, Azure, GCP, or across all of the above.
But here’s the trap: BYOS done wrong creates subscription drift, double-spending, and fragmented support. You end up with disconnected systems, cloud bills you don’t fully understand, and CFOs asking why cloud costs keep rising even though you “already paid for the subscriptions.”
This is where an expert Red Hat partner like Level Up can hopefully earn our “value-added” label. Not by selling you more, but by helping you right-size your existing spend with pinpoint precision.
We help clients:
- Map their existing entitlements to where they’ll drive the most value in the cloud.
- Ensure BYOS usage still contributes to committed spend agreements (via HCS).
- Avoid overpaying by double-checking marketplace purchases against internal licensing pools.
- Align software choices with long-term platform strategy, not short-term procurement fire drills.
The best cloud transformations aren’t just technical. They’re financial. BYOS, when guided by the right partner, lets you carry forward your Red Hat investments without creating any inefficiencies.
If you’re committed to hybrid cloud, make sure your subscriptions, and your IT budget, are working as hard as your infrastructure.
The Marketplace Isn’t Just a Store. It’s a Committed Drawdown Mechanism
Most teams think of the cloud marketplace as a convenience—a way to spin up 3rd-party software without hassling Procurement again. That’s true. But what the smartest teams know is this:
The public cloud marketplace is also a way to reduce your overall committed spend.
When you buy Red Hat software, like RHEL, OpenShift, or Ansible, through your cloud provider’s marketplace (AWS, Azure, or GCP), those purchases can count toward your committed spend agreements. This means you’re not just acquiring the software you need—you’re actively drawing down your financial obligation to the cloud provider.
Here’s what that unlocks:
- No dollar left behind: Every qualified purchase draws down your EDP, MACC, or CUD commitment.
- Alignment with procurement: Marketplace transactions are clean, trackable, and finance-approved.
- Fewer surprises at true-up: You can plan your cloud budget knowing your Red Hat purchases are part of the total strategy, not an extra line item.
But the real win? When you combine this with Hybrid Committed Spend (HCS) from Red Hat, you’re now double-counting every dollar: once toward your cloud commit, and again toward your Red Hat drawdown.
The result? Stacked discounts. Streamlined tracking. Strategic clarity.
What We’re Building With Clients
At Level Up, we don’t just want to help you finally understand what’s in your monthly cloud bills. We want to help you finally control them. And one of the ways we do this is by recommending that you structure your committed spend to unlock:
- Multi-surface discounts (cloud + Red Hat + Marketplace).
- Predictive burn analysis across hyperscalers.
- Reinvestment cycles that finance and IT operations both cheer for.
And when the time’s right? We can help you renegotiate each layer. Because you’re no longer under pressure with your cloud providers, and if anything, it will be your insights into your own cloud estate that brings the pressure to your cloud providers in those negotiations.
Sure, a Flashlight is Helpful. But You Deserve a Partner Who Uses it to Look for the Light Switch.
Even these days, too many cost optimization blogs seem to be offering you a flashlight and wishing you luck as you search the dark recesses of your public cloud library, one doc at a time. Offer Level Up a flashlight? The first thing we’re looking for is the light switch. Because our clients deserve nothing less than the crystal clarity that only full cloud cost illumination brings.
Want to get started?
Show us your public cloud bill. We’ll show you 5 things you probably didn’t know about it: cloudcostmgmt@levelupla.io.
Let’s turn cloud cost into clarity, and clarity into confidence.