Two things are going to make Zero Maintenance kind of difficult. Assuming Ubuntu on an AWS EC2 instance here. First one is taking OS updates that are security

Two things are going to make Zero Maintenance kind of difficult. Assuming Ubuntu on an AWS EC2 instance here. First one is taking OS updates that are security critical - as anytime you take an update theres a chance something somewhere gets broken. Second one is AWS instances themselves being switched. From time to time (very infrequently in my experience) Amazon will send you an email indicating your EC2 instance is being migrated to a new physical host and to initiate this you must manually restart your instance. As for the rest, a script in root's crontab that does: 1 - Delete log files older than X (because running out of disk space is not a good situation) 2 - Hit Lets Encrypt for new certs if necessary ( because expired certs give a lousy customer experience) 3 - Preemptively bounce any application servers (Nginx, PHP FPM, Tomcat, what have you ) 4 - Setup all hosts such that your critical software restarts at boot time in the event of an unexpected reboot situation (gives you the ability to cron schedule nightly reboot command) Additionally: * If you're running any database regardless of where, be sure you allocated enough space that you don't end up running out of database storage * Implement some downtime monitoring to tell you when there are issues * It's a good practice to be changing passwords on any authenticated resource at some interval too The practices listed here (off the top of my head - not an all inclusive list) are about as close as I attempt to get to Zero Maintenance myself. Customers pay for systems to be developed and they should expect some level of ongoing care and feeding as entropy is pervasive. But its a good excuse to sell your customers a maintenance contract right?