From ReadWriteWeb to the agentic web
Application development has changed radically in the cloud native era; and not just with the rise of containers and Kubernetes for large-scale deployments. Web development is also undergoing a sea change, with the emergence of JAMstack as a significant trend. Just as Docker was the original change agent for the containers revolution, a single company … Read more
“What we really want to do is transform Oracle’s market,” Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball told me in a recent interview. It was part of his explanation for why Cockroach Labs chose to build a relational database system in the middle of the cloud computing era. When the company launched in 2015, NoSQL … Read more
“Companies can no longer ignore the power of connected data for improving the accuracy of data science models and predictions,” Jim Webber, chief scientist of the graph database company Neo4j, told me last week. While that sounds like the usual grand, sweeping statement we get from tech companies, this time there’s a solid case study … Read more
When it comes to data for machine learning (ML) applications, often times a database system just doesn’t cut it. You need something bigger, like a data warehouse or data lake. There’s also an emerging class of specialist AI and big data platforms that are pitching something in-between a development platform and a data warehouse. One … Read more
I’ve been thinking lately about what value long-form writing has in the current internet era, which is dominated by a combination of video (e.g. YouTube), images (e.g. Instagram), ‘in the moment’ multimedia (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok) and the black and white opinions prevalent on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). There are two key aspects of the … Read more
Website builders are one of the staple products of the internet. From Geocities in 1994, to Blogger in 2004, to Squarespace in 2014, to Gatsby in 2020, these tools continue to occupy a central place on the web. However, one of these things is not like the other… You can draw a straight line between … Read more
The relational database is still the world’s most used category of database, but its popularity trend line has been flat for a number of years now. Meanwhile other, more cloud native, types of database systems are trending upwards. It’s particularly noticeable with NoSQL database systems of varying flavors, like document stores (MongoDB), key-value (Redis), and … Read more
In my previous column, I wrote about how the “serverless” trend has abstracted away the infrastructure layer for application developers. Well the same thing is happening to databases, via Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solutions like Amazon Aurora, MongoDB Atlas, Azure SQL Database and Redis Cloud Essentials. In its report on DBaaS vendors last year, analyst firm Forrester … Read more
A writer’s role is to build something thoughtful and/or delightful that is of value to people. It should help readers do their jobs, or help them understand the world, or help them cope with the world (by providing entertainment or comfort). Would that qualify as a “builder” in Marc Andreessen’s eyes?
Serverless is a growing trend in cloud computing, and it’s leading to a quiet revolution in how we mix and match data across the internet. The name itself is a misnomer because physical servers still exist (way down the stack, in massive data centers located in places like Nevada and Oregon). But in the serverless … Read more
I’ve been working at The New Stack for five weeks now, and am enjoying it more than any other job I’ve had since ReadWriteWeb. A big part of that is due to the team of people I’m working with, who have been generous with their time and knowledge, and welcoming. But I’m also feeling energized … Read more
In a guest post on The New Stack last week, Spectro Cloud‘s Tina Nolte wrote about the state of cloud computing in the current era of containers and Kubernetes (which she termed “Cloud 2.0”). I found her comments on how applications have changed to be particularly intriguing. In Cloud 2.0: “Your app looks different. It … Read more
Life in a time of pandemic, and updates about my new job and the status of my writing projects.
If the 2000s was when networking evolved on the internet (I called this the read/write era, others named it ‘Web 2.0’), and the 2010s was all about the compute layer, then the 2020s will see a revolution in the data layer. That’s according to DataStax Chief Strategy Officer Sam Ramji, who outlined his vision at … Read more
The big social media companies have rightfully come under immense pressure over the past week, in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack. But one question continues to bother me: why were Facebook and YouTube so ineffective when it came to shutting down the terrorist’s live stream and the dispersal of the video after? Over … Read more