Blogs
Introduction I’ll be honest when I say running a high-traffic production environment on AWS is fun…. until you see the cloud bill. At first, you overprovision a bit of memory “just to be safe.” Containers stay up a little longer than needed. Logs? Oh, we log everything because, you know, one day you might need it. And cross-AZ...
Introduction In ad-tech, logs are not “nice to have.” They are the product’s heartbeat. Every impression, every click, every bid request — everything generates logs. Multiply that by millions of requests per minute, and you’re suddenly dealing with millions of events and TB’s of logs per day. That’s exactly where one of our...
Introduction If you’ve worked in production long enough, you’ve probably heard this: “Let’s right-size the services and reduce the AWS bill.” So we do it. We check CPU and memory metrics for a week. We reduce task sizes. Costs drop. Everyone’s happy. And then…. six months later, the bill increases again....
Introduction When we started with Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate, it felt simple. No EC2 to manage. No AMIs. No cluster scaling headaches. Then the number of services grew. Working for the ad-tech client from last 5 years and running their workload on ECS Fargate has taught us many things. Different traffic patterns. Different...
Introduction DNS migrations don’t usually get much attention. They’re invisible when done right and very loud when done wrong. At TO THE NEW, we recently migrated DNS for an ad tech client from NS1 (an IBM Product) to AWS Route 53 as part of their large move to AWS and cost savings. On paper, this looked like a simple vendor...
Introduction DNS is rarely the first thing teams modernise. In most client environments we work with at To The New, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and observability mature quickly. DNS, however, often remains manually managed through dashboards, handled by a few people, and changed mostly during incidents. That gap usually goes unnoticed...
Introduction In DevOps, upgrades are rarely exciting. They don’t ship new features (most of the time). They don’t impress clients. They don’t always get leadership applause. And yet, over the years at To The New, one thing has become very clear to us: DevOps teams that do upgrades regularly move faster, stay safer,...
Introduction When teams start on their DevOps journey, the excitement is real. CI/CD pipelines, faster deployments, cloud-native tools, automation everywhere - it feels like everything is finally going to be smooth. But in reality, the first year of DevOps is rarely smooth. It’s messy, experimental, and full of learning. [caption...
Introduction Reducing cloud costs is always the top priority and biggest headache for Devops Engineers, especially when using managed AWS services like ECS Fargate. For one of our Ad-Tech clients at TO THE NEW, we were already utilising Fargate Spot to reduce the ECS bill significantly. But we found that we could save even more money if...
Introduction If you’ve ever worked with Kafka, you know the problem: data grows fast. Every click, impression, or event adds up, and before you know it, your Kafka broker's disks are full. Disk is not very cheap on AWS, and storing everything on expensive broker storage is costly, and scaling up to handle growth feels like throwing...
Introduction When companies move to the cloud, most think the hardest part is the migration itself. Truth is — that’s just the start. Over the past few years, we’ve worked with startups, large-scale platforms, and everything in between. What have we learned? Cloud without solid DevOps is like buying a sports car but never changing...
Introduction If you're still running MySQL 5.7 on Amazon RDS, it's time to act. AWS started charging for Extended Support in March 2024. By mid-2025, that charge is no longer theoretical, and paying for it is kind of unacceptable. You're likely already paying for it, and the cost will double by the end of this year. [caption...
