Cloud Spend is a Capital Allocation Problem That Companies Still Prefer to Call… Almost Anything Else For roughly the first decade and a half of enterprise cloud adoption, most organizations were evaluating their success in the cloud almost entirely through an engineering lens: Did our cloud migration finally finish? Do our developers release faster these…
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…
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…
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…
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…