Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the last year, one theme has consistently emerged in conversations with customers: organizations want to move faster, but not at the cost of the operational stability their business depends on. Whether the discussion is about modernization initiatives, automation programs, AI adoption, or platform upgrades, the underlying challenge is often the same. IT leaders are under pressure to deliver innovation while maintaining stability.

How to track expenses for a business: categorize expense types (operating, software, cloud, travel, capital), choose a tracking method (spreadsheet, accounting software, expense management tool, or cost intelligence platform), connect data sources (bank feeds, cloud billing APIs, SaaS invoices), assign ownership per cost center, set a reporting schedule, and audit quarterly.

CloudZero now splits an Amazon Bedrock line item into spend by model and by the team, user, or project behind each call, straight from your AWS bill.

Last Christmas, after everyone had gone quiet for the holidays, I sat down with a pen and some paper and started drawing Spike. Not the Spike we actually had, but the Spike I wanted, the one I had been carrying around in my head for a long time without ever really putting it down anywhere. A little while later I brought a few of those screens into Figma and showed them to the team over coffee one afternoon.

Managing IT assets smoothly is not an easy task. Organizations depend more on technology to execute their operations these days. Hence, the requirement for effective IT Asset Management (ITAM) has grown considerably. However, beyond merely managing these assets, ensuring compliance with relevant ITAM regulations and standards matters just as much. And, in this race to keep up with changing regulations, you are not alone. Many organizations face the same challenge.

On-call duty is a high-stakes reality in modern IT and digital ops teams. While essential for ensuring system reliability, the chronic stress it creates doesn’t have to be a given. On-call burnout is a serious threat to your team’s well-being and your organization’s performance, but it isn’t inevitable. It’s a systemic problem, not a personal failing.

Modern IT incidents don’t stick to a 9-to-5 schedule. System failures, security breaches, and performance degradations can happen at any time, and today’s distributed teams must respond instantly, wherever they are. The ability to receive, acknowledge, and manage incidents directly from a smartphone is no longer a luxury—it’s a core requirement for effective incident response in 2026.

Upsun is included in IDC ProductScape guide to worldwide cloud deployment-centric platform capabilities. Building and scaling applications has never been more complex or more critical. Engineering teams are under constant pressure to ship faster, manage increasingly complex infrastructure, and adapt to the rapid rise of agent and AI-powered development. Choosing the right platform to support these demands is an important decision for technology organizations.

AI teams have invested heavily in evaluation frameworks, yet getting those frameworks beyond local experimentation remains challenging. Teams using open source libraries like DeepEval and Pydantic Evals gain flexibility and research-grounded metrics, but operationalizing those evaluations still requires brittle custom integration code that doesn’t scale.

Builder in the loop is a Mezmo interview series focused on the engineers, product leaders, and operators shaping AURA, an open-source, MCP-native agent harness for production operations. This installment features Tony Rogers, whose work on AURA is less about building new features and more about trying to break them before users can.