Automation is the part of DevOps that actually earns the title. Day 6 was two of the most everyday automation tasks there are, and both had a trap sitting in plain sight.
One Linux task, one AWS task. Schedule a recurring job with cron, and launch an EC2 instance from the AWS CLI. The tasks come from the KodeKloud Engineer platform if you want the same lab to work through.
Cron: five fields, one rule that trips everyone
Cron is the scheduler that has quietly run Linux automation for decades. You hand it a job and a schedule, and its daemon, crond, wakes up every minute to check whether anything is due. If that daemon is not running, nothing fires, so the first move is making sure it is installed and enabled.
# Become root
