CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is a software pattern, which in its simplest form, looks at segregating Commands from Queries.

Most applications do far more reading from writing, and in this scenario, CQRS can really improve scalability. Databases do not normally scale easily or cheaply (in a cloud environment you may have to jump up a tier based on the resource usage, and this can quickly become costly!)

What are the benefits of CQRS?

Scaling and Optimisations

It is possible to scale resources independently. An example of this may be you have a 20%, 80% split for commands, to queries. Using CQRS means you can have a smallish instance…

What is a semantic version?

Software versioning has always been an issue ever since software has been created. Semantic versioning is a universal way of versioning some software or a development project where multiple versions of the software exist, or plan to exist.

A semantic version comes in the form of a number, split into pieces by a . such as a.b.c, where:

• a is the major version
• b is the minor version
• c is a patch

In a real scenario it would look something like:

• 1.0.0
• 1.0.4-snapshot
• 0.1.7752

Pre-requisites

In this article, I will be working with the following software, it makes sense to have these pre-installed before continuing.

• minikube - minikube is local Kubernetes, focusing on making it easy to learn and develop for Kubernetes
• kubectl - The Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl, allows you to run commands against Kubernetes clusters.
• k9s - K9s provides a terminal UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters.
• helm - helm Charts help you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes configurations

You can install all by using brew if on OSX, or check out the website for detailed installation instructions.

Creating a Namespace

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When working with kubernetes, it is sometimes useful to spin up a container within a cluster to just test something quickly.

What is AWS Client VPN?

AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables you to securely access your AWS resources and resources in your on-premises network. With Client VPN, you can access your resources from any location using an OpenVPN-based VPN client.

Mutual authentication — generating certs

With mutual authentication, Client VPN uses certificates to perform authentication between the client and the server.

In order to use this using this guide, you will want to generate some certs, and import them into the certificate manager in AWS.

There is a pretty good guide here:

In my case, I generated the following files:

CA: ca.crt Client: craig.vpn.management.XXX.com.crt Client…

GitOps is a broad term, which generally describes some processes used when deploying cloud-native applications.

A source control repository is used as a mechanism to provide a declarative description of the current state of some infrastructure.

I’ve recently had to work on services that require to be installed on Windows, and because of this, using a container was out of the question.

It was part of a migration which due to time constraints required lifting and shifting the machines rather than spending time automating and getting it right.

Due to cost, it was not necessary to create high availability as long as the service could recover within a reasonable time (10 minutes) without any loss of backing data.

I had an underutilized raspberry pi, running raspian headless.

I set it up a couple of months back to run pihole

To utilise my pi further, I decided to see if I could run Airflow on it. I have used airflow in the past to run python tasks and thought it could come in handy for running some automation tasks at home.

Turns out it is very easy to set up and runs really well!