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. Nothing “dramatic” changed. No […]
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 scaling […]
When we run Elasticsearch in production, one of the common issues is imbalance in “shards”. There may be one node in the cluster that is out of disk space, while a few nodes with no shards on them. For example, here is a node with all the shards: Node Shards Disk Used Disk % Free […]
Introduction What if upgrading your Kubernetes cluster required no downtime at all? Imagine if you could upgrade your Kubernetes cluster and keep everything running smoothly, with zero downtime. Sounds pretty great, right? A lot of teams worry that upgrading will mean their apps go offline, but with solid planning, it’s actually possible to have safe […]
It is painfully inefficient to check metrics across a large collection of AWS accounts (development, staging, uat, production, etc.). This is a major time waster, not just a small irritation. In addition to wasting valuable engineering time, you run a much higher risk of missing an alert that could result in a full-blown outage every […]
Introduction If you have a Java application running in Kubernetes, sooner or later you will want to know what’s really going on inside the JVM. And, is heap memory close to exhaustion? Is the garbage collection process busy? Are we slowly moving towards an OOM error? Without oversight, you’re essentially flying blind. In this guide, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Real-time multiplayer games are unforgiving. Players don’t care for your flashy server hardware and state of the art network infrastructure, they care about quick response matches, fair competition, and smooth gameplay. When that breaks, they don’t blame latency graphs; they blame the game. At TO THE NEW, we’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: studios that treat […]
