Blogs
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...
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" } [caption id="attachment_73692" align="aligncenter" width="625"] terraform + aws[/caption] And it worked. So you left it alone. Then one day, someone tries to use...
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...
Introduction We used to rely on Pingdom for uptime monitoring. It worked well with simple checks, nice UI, and reliable and clean alerts. But one day, someone on our DevOps team casually said: "Hey, why are we paying for something that only pings URLs?" And that kicked off a big conversation. The Cost Wake-Up Pingdom wasn’t...
Introduction At To The New, we work with all kinds of customers from fast-moving startups to huge enterprises, and one thing is always true: Nobody likes surprises on their AWS bill, nor Anyone likes downtime. When people think of saving money in AWS, they usually jump straight to EC2 instance rightsizing or removing idle resources....
Introduction Handling AWS costs is very important for cloud bill optimizations. One overlooked service that can significantly contribute to monthly expenses is Elastic Load Balancing. Our team, which works for a global advertising management platform client, a powerhouse in advertising and connected TVs, recently undertook a major step...
Introduction Cloud cost optimization is a vast and evolving discipline, but at its core, it starts with visibility. You can’t optimize what you can’t see. So, gaining granular insight into your cloud usage and billing is the basic foundation. You're not the only one who has ever thought, "This bill feels too high," after seeing your...
Introduction For years, we have used Kafka in the Data Centre, then we moved to AWS and started using EC2 to run Kafka. However, the headaches increased along with our usage. We began to feel as though we were spending more time managing Kafka than creating anything of value due to broker upgrades, Zookeeper problems, imbalanced...
Introduction If you have worked with databases, you might have definitely crossed paths with MySQL, and probably used mysqldump at some point. It’s a go-to utility for backing up MySQL databases. But let’s be honest — most of us use it in its basic form and forget about it. Here’s the thing: MySQLdump is way more powerful than we...
Introduction Building and deploying applications that use Apache Kafka for real-time data processing is made simple with Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka), a fully managed service by AWS. Rack awareness is one overlooked configuration change that can greatly increase fault tolerance and cost effectiveness, even though MSK...
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...
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...
