DevOps

I Left This AWS Task Half-Done for 2 Weeks – Here’s What It Taught Me

Introduction When you work with AWS infrastructure for some time, you realise that not all problems announce themselves with alerts or outages. Some problems stay quiet, blend into the background, and only reveal themselves later-usually when someone asks a question you can’t answer clearly. This is one such experience from my early days of working […]

February 15, 2026

DevOps

DNS as Code in Action: Lessons from a Client Project with NS1 and Terraform

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 until traffic needs to be […]

January 31, 2026

DevOps

Why Regular Upgrades Are Non-Negotiable in Modern DevOps

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, and break […]

January 15, 2026

DevOps

An Introduction to Palo Alto VM-Series Next-Generation Firewall in the AWS Cloud

Introduction As more organizations move their workloads to the cloud, traditional security models are no longer enough. Modern cloud environments need security that can keep up with changing infrastructure and workloads. The Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) stands out by bringing enterprise-level security controls to virtualized and cloud-native environments. What Is Palo Alto […]

January 15, 2026

DevOps

DevOps Is Not a One-Time Setup: First-Year Lessons from the Field

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. At To The New, while working […]

January 14, 2026

DevOps

Boosting ECS Costs Savings: Moving to Graviton with Fargate Spot

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 […]

January 14, 2026

DevOps

From Hot Brokers to S3: Optimizing Kafka Storage with Tiered Storage

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 […]

January 14, 2026

DevOps

Architecting with Multi-Account AWS Organizations: How to Design Your Organization

Introduction Picture a busy factory — one large room where designers, testers, builders, and even the CEO are working shoulder to shoulder. Machines hum as prototypes are built right next to the production line, all sharing the same tools, the same power supply, and the same cramped space. Sounds messy, doesn’t it? One of our […]

December 22, 2025

DevOps

From VPNs to Zero Trust: How Zscaler Simplified Your Security and User Experience

INTRODUCTION Remember the old morning routine? Grab coffee, open the laptop, and then…the waiting game. Staring at that little icon, praying the corporate VPN would finally connect. If you’re still living that life, we need to talk. The world in which we work has undergone significant changes. We’re at home, in cafes, on the road. […]

November 13, 2025