HashiCorp’s recent move to bring Terraform under a more restricted-use license may not be the last from companies seeking greater control of the markets their products generate.

Featured on The New Stack: The streaming service provider made waves when its engineers reported they had refactored their QoS monitor for a monolithic architecture. Microservices experts evaluating the details discovered they actually did just the opposite.

You invested tremendous sums to portray yourself as a digital transformer, focused on empowering people, revolutionizing business, securing the future. Then your board lays off a tenth of your staff. That didn’t help.

In this November 2022 post for The New Stack, sponsored by Neo4j, Scott examines the age-old problem of outmoded systems — whether they be technological, sociological, or psychological — that are sustained long past their expiration date.

Neo4j is a system that enables you to build the connections and relationships that you know already exist in your data, into your database from the beginning. There’s extra up-front effort involved with this, but it’s handled in a sensible, intelligible, intuitive, and perhaps even enjoyable way. The payoff comes with the greatly enhanced value of the results you receive. They’re more informational, more analytically relevant, and especially in the case of large and huge data sets, faster.

A tremendous amount of database science is devoted to the fine art of “normalization” – making your data easier for their databases to digest. Time to ask yourself: Who does normalization actually serve?

The competition between nations for leadership in communications, has morphed into outright combat. If it's not a campaign the US can win, do we start drawing down the mission? Or can the hope of a second wave compel us to double down?

For this April 2021 ZDNet news story, Scott called upon three experts in constitutional law to shed light upon whether copying and modifying the API library of commercial software protected by copyright, constitutes infringement of that copyright. The US Supreme Court ruled that week, it did not. Or at least that’s may have been how the ruling was intended to be construed.

Wait, wasn’t 5G supposed to be about greater bandwidth, faster service, and more options for consumer streaming? While we’re waiting for one revolution to start, perhaps another one can be jump-started downtown.

Sometime between now and 2030, the mathematical system that protects all of digital communications may fall victim to a superior quantum system. Preparing for that time may require us to reinvent the network itself.

The fate of nations may depend upon the contributions of brave patients willing to risk their lives for treatments and vaccines. The technology that supports them, like almost everything else, has been ravaged by the pandemic.

World leaders are being blamed either for ignoring the data belying the significance of the novel coronavirus, or paying too much attention to it. Perhaps it would help if neural networks made that data more relevant.

Coming back from a DevOps conference sponsored by the software delivery automation tool maker CloudBees, I warned my friend and New Stack editor, Alex Williams, that I had talked with nearly everyone there about the “cloud-native” buzzword. On the plane back, I wrote him a very long note, listing all the various permutations of the concept of “cloud-native DevOps” I had heard. On my layover, I heard back from him that my note should be a New Stack article.

It has often sounded utopic, like the ousting of a totalitarian regime by an egalitarian republic. Microservices, as has often been stated, enables not only scalability but flexibility in the way applications are managed. But have we been unrealistic about all this?

Where a post-war college researcher witnesses the birth of IT job silos two decades before the jobs themselves would be invented, and triggers a revolution whose objectives are literally all over the map.

It’s the beginning of a software-defined security model for microservices. At least, it’s the beginning of the first attempt, and the start of a very long argument over what an online identity truly is, and who or what it’s supposed to protect.

From September 2016, this three-part series (prefaced by an op-ed piece) for the Web marketing publication CMSWire has aged very, very little. In fact, the questions these articles pose are even more valid today, with the coming changes to Google Analytics and the long-delayed encroachment of large-language-model (LLM) AI into the field of organic search. I’ve seen the questions raised by Dynatrace, AppDynamics (now part of Cisco), and others in this series, characterized at the time by the phrase “all of a sudden,” raised again in just the past few weeks and treated with an equally sudden state of shock.

If you’re not really supposed to care about the schematics of the telecommunications networks and platforms you use, then why are we bothering to portray them as “smart?”

“What computing rule of thumb,” reads a trivia question on How-To Geek, “predicts the doubling of computing power every two years?” It’s a tougher question than you may think.

Some gigs are short for a good reason. Back in 2015, Scott’s four-week-and-two-day adventure as a reporter for IDG News Service, assigned to cover Microsoft, climaxed with a trip to Redmond to cover the company’s official unveiling of the Windows 10 operating system to the press. Soon afterward, he wrote this op-ed, which his short-time employer declined to publish.