Hibernate ORM with Cloud Spanner

Google just released beta support for Cloud Spanner dialect for Hibernate ORM. This enables Java (and other JVM based languages) developers integrating their applications directly with Cloud Spanner and helps them to increase productivity. Support for Hibernate ORM is built on top of the open source Cloud Spanner JDBC driver.…

Rethink. Reset. Restart.

Rethink. In May I started my journey with HorseAnalytics serving as their CTO. Just a couple of weeks into my tenure the unthinkable happened: money ran out and we were not able to secure bridge funding to see the motion we already set into motion to an end.…

Visio stencils for Azure

Yes. Visio is still a thing. To draw expressive diagrams with the correct visual representation of the underlying services you need to have access to quality stencils. There is the Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set - SVG from Microsoft of course but I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from David Summers today where he shared his own additional set of stencils for Azure.…

Update DigitalOcean DNS entry on DHCP bind

Many use services like DynDNS to make systems behind a dail-up or dynamic line accessible from the outside. But if your primary DNS is hosted somewhere else (e.g. Azure DNS or some other provider) and this provider offers APIs to interact with the domain records, it is pretty easy to write a script that will take of updating the IP when it changes.…

Fix unspecified errors working with Azure root Management Group

If you have not been working with Management Groups to manage Azure at scale, I recommend to review the documentation. You should also take a look at the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (which was just recently updated). When you start using Management Groups you might want to change the display name of the root management group or do other changes to the hierarchy.…

Local time for programmatically created Azure Dashboards

When you begin to operationalize your deployments and want to add monitoring one of the things you might do is to create shared dashboards as part of your deployment. A shared dashboard is basically the same as a non-shared dashboard except it is a full Azure resource, lives in a resource group and can be created through ARM.…