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 […]

MSP

MongoDB Recovery Practice — DR Drill Automation with Terraform, Python & Jenkins

  MongoDB Recovery Practice — DR Drill Automation with Terraform, Python & Jenkins When disaster strikes, the only thing that matters is how fast and reliably you can get your database back. Backups on a shelf are worthless if you can’t restore them under pressure. I built an automated MongoDB restore pipeline with Terraform, Python, […]

Mrinal Narang
Mrinal Narang
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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 […]

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: […]

MSP

Why Terraform Is a Popular Choice in the Industry

Why Terraform Is a Popular Choice in the Industry In an era where businesses demand rapid scalability and resilience, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become essential. Among the many tools available, Terraform by HashiCorp stands out as a favorite in the industry. Whether you’re managing cloud infrastructure, automating deployments, or building hybrid environments, Terraform simplifies […]

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 […]

DevOps

Terraform 1.5 Import Block: Eliminate Manual Imports and Streamline IaC

Introduction We know that sometimes the cloud infrastructure is already set up before we start using Terraform. Traditionally, if we wanted to import these resources into Terraform and control them, we had to run some manual import commands. It was a pain and made it tricky to keep things smooth when working in a collaborative […]

MSP

Terraform Meets GitOps: Setting Up Atlantis on AWS for Automated Infrastructure Management

Introduction Infrastructure automation is a crucial part of modern DevOps workflows, enabling teams to manage cloud resources efficiently using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Terraform is a widely used IaC tool, and when paired with Atlantis, it provides a seamless, GitHub-driven workflow for managing infrastructure changes. Atlantis integrates Terraform with version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, […]