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 turn
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 list
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 te
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 o
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 fai
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"
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, w
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 ki
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 agili
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 Setti