Automated MySQL RDS/Aurora initialization with CDK, Fargate and the MySQL CLI

A recurring task when provisioning databases is to initialize them with initial users, stored procedures, and/or tables.

In the CDK world, there is currently no native support for this, but there are some workarounds. AWS has a blog post about this, but it’s using a Lambda function, and a bunch of custom code which seemed like too much operational overhead for me.

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Lessons learned when restoring a MySQL Aurora RDS database from S3/Percona Xtrabackup

Recently I was trying to restore a Aurora database from an Percona xtrabackup, the de-facto industry standard for backing up self-managed MySQL databases. Luckily, RDS and Aurora natively support restoring a cluster from Percona xtrabackups. This comes very handy for migrations of big databases (For more information, check out the docs and this prescriptive guidance article from AWS).

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Serverless - a new model to run backend software

For me, serverless has become the default model of developing backend applications.
However, a meeting a few weeks ago was a reminder for me that not the entire world is embracing serverless applications already: I had the task to design an “Energy Data Importer”, an application that collects time series data from different locations, sanitizes and transforms them and stores them in a database for later lookup. So I went ahead and sketched the application with AWS serverless building blocks and patterns.

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Paul O'Neill: The Irreducible Components of Leadership

This is an annotated transcription from Paul O’Neill’s talk on leadership - in my opinion the most powerful and inspiring talk I have ever seen on leadership. I decided to transcribe it (well, Youtube did the most work with its automatic subtitles feature), because there are so many great quotes in it and I wanted to have it as a source for myself, e.g. for futures articles, so I always have a written reference.

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