How I Built 5 Linux Automation Scripts on AWS EC2

The author created an Ubuntu 22.04 server on AWS EC2 in May 2026 to gain hands-on experience with a real Linux environment, building and automating five production-style Bash scripts for server health monitoring, disk alerts, log maintenance, user provisioning, and backups. All scripts were scheduled using cron jobs to run automatically at various intervals, such as every 15 minutes for health checks and daily at 2 AM for backups. The project helped the author transition from unfamiliarity with terminal commands to a mindset focused on automating repetitive tasks, with all scripts and documentation available open-source on GitHub.

I wanted to find out what working on a real Linux server actually feels like — not a local VM, not a simulator. So in May 2026, I spun up an Ubuntu 22.04 server on AWS EC2, connected via SSH, and spent the entire month doing real work on it. Here's what I built. chmod , chown ps , top , kill , systemctl ss , curl , UFW, DNS apt scp , rsync grep , awk , and sed By the end of the month, I had built and automated 5 production-style Bash scripts. A monitoring script that checks: Scheduled every 15 minutes using cron. ./server health.sh Example output: ================================================ SERVER HEALTH CHECK REPORT ================================================ Date: 2026-05-12 10:00:00 Hostname: ip-172-xx-xx-xx --- CPU Usage --- ✅ CPU is OK 2.3% --- Memory Usage --- ✅ RAM is OK 45% --- Services Status --- ✅ ssh: RUNNING ✅ nginx: RUNNING ✅ docker: RUNNING --- Network --- ✅ Internet: CONNECTED ================================================ A script that scans partitions and generates alerts when disk usage exceeds a threshold. Features: Runs every hour through cron. A maintenance script that: Built using find , gzip , and mtime filters for log retention management. Runs every Sunday. A provisioning script for creating users with a consistent setup. Features: sudo ./user creation.sh --file users.csv Creates compressed backups using tar.gz archives. Features: Scheduled daily at 2 AM. All scripts were automated using cron jobs. Health check — every 15 minutes /15 /home/ubuntu/scripts/server health.sh /home/ubuntu/logs/health cron.log 2 &1 Disk alerter — every hour 0 /home/ubuntu/scripts/disk alerter.sh /home/ubuntu/logs/disk cron.log 2 &1 Backup — daily at 2 AM 0 2 /home/ubuntu/scripts/backup.sh /home/ubuntu/logs/backup cron.log 2 &1 Log cleaner — every Sunday at 11 PM 0 23 0 /home/ubuntu/scripts/log cleaner.sh /home/ubuntu/logs/cleaner cron.log 2 &1 Once configured, the server handled routine maintenance automatically. At the beginning, basic terminal commands felt unfamiliar. After working daily on a remote server, navigating Linux from the command line became much more natural. There's no shortcut — you just have to do it daily. One of the biggest mindset shifts was noticing repetitive work and immediately thinking: "Can this be automated?" That shift alone made scripting feel much more practical — and honestly, more fun. Working on an actual EC2 instance exposed me to problems that are difficult to fully understand in local environments: Solving those problems on a live server taught me far more than just reading commands from documentation. Next, I'm moving into AWS Core Infrastructure — VPC, IAM, RDS, and Terraform. That work starts in June 2026. Follow along if you're on a similar path. All scripts and documentation are open source: 👉 github.com/tanayjdev/linux-bash-scripts BCA Student • Aspiring Cloud & DevOps Engineer