Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I have an Upsun project that's nothing but proofs of concept. It's a dashboard, basically. Each POC gets its own tile. Click in, and you land on a page with three tabs. The first tab is a written explanation of what the POC argues. The second tab is the POC itself, with a built-in demo that automates a walkthrough of the feature so the recipient can watch it run without me on the call.

Enterprise AI has crossed an inflection point. The model problem is largely covered. What remains unsolved is the operational impact: how to run AI inference and agentic processes continuously, reliably, and at a cost that doesn’t cancel out the value. Most enterprises are discovering this the hard way. GPU utilization dashboards show 80%. Actual compute efficiency is half that. Token demand is compounding at 200-500% annually as agents multiply every action into dozens of model calls.

CloudZero originated as a way to make sense of your cloud costs. Costs spread across bills with billions of line items belonging to resources that might or might not have been tagged (or taggable), spun up by engineers working across teams, on different microservices, features, and products, that served a wide range of customers. Kubernetes. Multi-cloud. Check, check, check.

Every quarter, the same scene plays out in boardrooms across the Fortune 500. The CEO asks: “What is the return on everything the company is spending on AI?” The CTO talks about productivity gains and developer velocity. The CFO points at a cloud bill that doubled but cannot isolate which line items are AI. The board nods politely and tables the discussion until next quarter, when the same question will produce the same non-answer. (If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Keep reading.)

I keep hearing the phrase "code is cheap." I don't know who came up with it. Whoever it was clearly has not seen an Anthropic bill. I get what they mean. The cost of writing a line of code has cratered, AI does most of the typing, you know the rest. Fine. But the phrase is combative in a way that doesn't help anyone, especially the engineers in the room. "Code is accessible" lands better. Less swagger, more honesty. Either way, here's the line my friend Guillaume gave me that finally cracked it open.

By benchmarking five GCP machine types across both Logstash and Kafka, LivePerson's observability team found that infrastructure selection (not just pipeline configuration) is one of the highest-leverage cost optimization decisions at scale.

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28, 2026, exactly 41 days after Opus 4.7. The SERP was empty for two days after launch. Not because nobody cared. Because engineering managers and finance teams were doing the math on whether the bill changes.

Customizability. Feature velocity. Performance. Capabilities that are critically important to all B2B software users. And capabilities in which CloudZero’s brand-new platform specializes. Pitching a total frontend overhaul didn’t necessarily make me CloudZero’s most popular new PM. But it’s made CloudZero faster, more customizable for a wider range of personas, and easier to update with the new features that matter most to our customers. And, if I may say, it also looks beautiful.