DevOps

Real-World AWS Cost Optimization Strategies for High-Traffic Platforms

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 […]

DevOps

From Logstash to Fluent Bit: How We Streamlined Logging for an Ad Tech Client

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 platforms was. […]

DevOps

Why Right-Sizing Is Not a One-Time Activity

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 […]

DevOps

ECS Fargate at Scale: Lessons from Running Multiple Microservices in Production

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

DevOps

Leadership in the Age of AI + AWS

Artificial Intelligence has managed to move from research labs to boardroom conversations. Today, every technology leader is under pressure to “do AI.” Customers want personalized experiences, competitors are embedding AI into their offerings, and investors expect a clear AI strategy in every roadmap. But here’s the hard truth: the majority of AI projects fail to […]

Vijit Vidya
Vijit Vidya
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DevOps

Stop Paying Extra: How We Helped an Ad-Tech Company Cut AWS RDS Costs by Upgrading from MySQL 5.7

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 […]