Intro For many customers just starting out in the public cloud, Microsoft® Azure’s pay-as-you-go model feels like freedom… until it doesn’t. What begins as a flexible and low-friction experience can suddenly become quite constraining. Because if you want any kind of substantial discounting, you’ll have to commit to a minimum amount of overall spend in…
QandAgent®: Own Your Intelligence Layer. Built by Level Up’s Agentic AI practice, QandAgent is designed to help you: Turn your organization’s internal docs into a private, end-to-end secure, AI Agent-based Q&A service. Fully local. No cloud. No proprietary LLM APIs. No recurring costs. It’s yours: your data, your intellectual property, your AI Agent. Your Internal…
Briefly, Level Up wishes to congratulate Red Hat® on being officially named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Container Platforms, Q3 2025! Read the full Forrester Wave report here: https://reprint.forrester.com/reports/the-forrester-wavetm-multicloud-container-platforms-q3-2025-f3367e46/index.html Red Hat OpenShift® earned highest scores across both current offering and strategy evaluations, proof of its unmatched maturity and vision in enterprise Kubernetes platforms. Level Up…
Despite some recent media headlines to the contrary, Agentic AI is harder than it looks. So what should you be seeking in a custom AI agent development shop these days? As Chief Architect of Level Up, I’m not objective, but I have done my homework, and I personally think it looks a lot like what…
If you’ve been doing DevOps for a while already, when it comes to security for cloud native apps, you’ve surely heard it all by now: “Security is everyone’s responsibility.” “Bake security into your source code, don’t bolt it on after.” “Shift left.” These DevSecOps slogans all sound great, but turning them into reality takes more…
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…