DevOps

DNS Migration Done Right: Lessons from Moving to Route 53

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 […]

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 […]

Vivek Tiwary
Vivek Tiwary
Read

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 […]

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

Migrating to the Cloud? Here’s Why 9 Out of 10 Clients Stick with TO THE NEW for DevOps

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 […]

DevOps

From Chaos to Clarity: How We Fixed Jenkins Without Starting Over

Introduction At To The New, we help customers across various industries develop cutting-edge, scalable infrastructure. However, you must first tame the beast before you can scale anything. And in this case, the beast was Jenkins. Jenkins setups that have grown disorganized over time are a problem for many organisations. Engineers spend more time troubleshooting than […]

DevOps

Upgrading the Terraform AWS Provider: Painful, But Worth It

Introduction If you’re using Terraform for IAAC with AWS, you might have probably declared the provider like this in your code: provider “aws” {  region = “us-west-2” } And it worked. So you left it alone. Then one day, someone tries to use a newer module… and Terraform throws a special error: Error: unsupported argument […]

DevOps

Mastering Terraform State: Real Incidents, Lessons, and Best Practices

Introduction: What is Terraform State? Terraform doesn’t just apply your infrastructure code and forget about it. It keeps track of what’s been created — every EC2 instance, every S3 bucket, every RDS database, every security group, and many more. That data is stored in a file called terraform.tfstate. This state file is how Terraform knows: […]

DevOps

Modern Terraform Practices: Removing Resources Safely from State

Introduction and Usecase There are times when we want Terraform to stop managing a resource, but don’t want to delete it from the infrastructure. In this brief blog, I’m going to discuss removing resources from Terraform configuration files while keeping them in real infrastructure. But why would you want to do this in the first […]