Below, Level Up’s Cloud Cost Management Practice shares highlighted pro tips for Procurement and Cloud Ops teams who may be negotiating upcoming MACCs. 1. “Which Marketplace offers currently qualify for MACC drawdown, and how often does that eligibility list change?” → Why it matters: Not every listing qualifies, even if it’s the same product from…
Intro Still launching new AWS EC2 instances with sizes based on a guess, while never reviewing your older instances either? That’s a recipe for cloud overspend. In this Level Up Cloud Cost Management Practice post, we show you how to use Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Compute Optimizer, and real workload telemetry to rightsize your EC2 fleet,…
Public cloud committed spend options are supposed to save you money, that’s the entire point of having them. Far too often though, Level Up’s clients actually tell us that deciding on an optimal AWS EC2 instance pricing strategy can feel taking like a multiple choice test… but with wrong answers only. In this Cloud Cloud…
From Level Up’s Fractional CTO executive practice: Questions to answer before you hire your first full-time dev, CTO, or agency. UX 1. What’s the critical path UX flow, and have we tested it with real users on real devices yet? 2. What’s the fallback UX going to be if a critical internal service fails? And…
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 basically feel trapped by their legacy hypervisors. Meanwhile, what used to be a…
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…