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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Lesegruppen / Buchclubs in Unternehmen

Buchbesprechungen als Werkzeug für Organisationales Lernen

Auf den devopsdays 2015 in Berlin hatten wir eine Open Space Gruppe, die sich mit dem Thema beschäftigte: “Ich lese viele Bücher, Blogs etc, und würde dieses Wissen gerne in das Unternehmen tragen, in dem ich gerade arbeite”. Dabei kam die Idee auf, Lesegruppen zu bilden. Diese Idee fand ich so gut, dass ich sie direkt einmal ausprobiert habe.

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"Service Discovery" with AWS Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation

How to dynamically pass environment variables to Elastic Beanstalk.

Elastic Beanstalk is a great AWS service for managed application hosting. For me personally, it’s the Heroku of AWS: Developers can concentrate on developing their application while AWS takes care of all the heavy lifting of scaling, deployment, runtime updates, monitoring, logging etcpp.

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AWS Continuous Infrastructure Delivery with CodePipeline and CloudFormation: How to pass Stack Parameters

When deploying CloudFormation stacks in a “Continuous Delivery” manner with CodePipeline, one might encounter the challenge to pass many parameters from the CloudFormation stack describing the pipeline to another stack describing the infrastructure to be deployed (in this example a stack named application).

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