Intro Nobody migrates to the public cloud to end up spending more. But for many organizations, that’s exactly what happens. Even so, the root causes of overspending frequently remain under-examined by cloud customers. In this Level Up Cloud Cost Management Practice post, we explore the “psychology” of cloud spend, why developer autonomy can inadvertently lead…
Are You Staying on Your Current Hypervisor Because You Really Want To… or Because You Think You Have To? The reality is: there’s more choice among virtualization vendors than ever. Yet too many customers we meet still initially tell us that they feel stuck with their legacy hypervisors. Meanwhile, what used to be a stable…
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…
Over the past several years, Level Up has had the privilege of supporting some of the most forward-thinking organizations in their automation and cloud journeys. Along the way, we’ve seen firsthand how transformative public cloud platforms like AWS®, Azure®, and Google Cloud® can be, unlocking agility, scalability, and speed at a scale that legacy infrastructure…
If you’re using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), chances are your automation estate isn’t static. Teams grow. Infrastructure expands. Workloads shift across clouds and datacenters. Often, AAP customers can benefit from the convenience of simply applying their username/password in the Settings | Subscriptions area of their AAP controller, and selecting the full AAP subscription…
Background As you probably already know, Level Up loves containers and all things cloud native. Preparing for a certification exam like Red Hat’s EX188 (primarily focused on a high-level overview of Red Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes, as well as Podman, Skopeo, and Buildah practical skills) is about more than memorization, it’s about mastering a repeatable system of…
The Level Up team saw a question recently around how to reverse-engineer an Ansible playbook, in order to try to validate it and then modify it for one’s own purposes. Upfront, we’d generally recommend a good-better-best approach to unraveling anybody else’s Ansible code (much of this can be applied to your own Ansible code too).…
Level Up is proud to have been featured recently in a Red Hat® partner case study, which showcases some of our customer project experience supporting cloud offerings such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) on AWS. As highlighted: “Level Up, a Red Hat Premier partner, provided Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on AWS via cloud marketplace…
Since a number of our customers have had questions for us about the recent announcements around AWX [https://www.ansible.com/blog/upcoming-changes-to-the-awx-project/], we wanted to share our views on the current/future state of the AWX project as of Q4 2024, and make sure that everyone is making a fully-informed near-term decision that’s best for their organizations and goals with infrastructure…
An early milestone for an Ansible developer is when you first begin mixing your traditional playbooks with roles. As you’ll see in this post, one of the most effective ways to get the many benefits of roles, without sacrificing the straightforwardness of your playbooks– especially in terms of being precise about what tasks you actually…