For years, Linux has been the purveyor of cloud computing servers. But given the exponential growth of the cloud and the fact that Linux wasn’t designed specifically for it, it became clear that something had to change.
This change could come from Michael Stonebraker (Ingres, PostgreSQL and VoltDB) and Matei Zaharia (Apache Spark and co-founder/CTO of Databrisk) who worked with a team at MIT to create a revolutionary operating system called DBOS, aka DataBase OS .
Work on DBOS began in 2022.
“Distributed in-memory data stores are becoming extremely fast”
In an early blog post, DBOS Inc. co-founders Peter Craft and Qian Li said: “We believe the next generation of operating systems should be database-oriented because databases are built to solve the difficult problems of modern computing. Today, databases can handle petabytes of data, are distributed and increasingly suited to cloud computing, and can secure and govern data with access control granularity and traceability. Equally important, modern distributed in-memory data stores like VoltDB and FoundationDB are becoming extremely fast, and we will show that they are fast enough to efficiently run many OS services that traditional disk-based RDBMSs could not. not to do”.
They then proposed to build a database-oriented operating system which is structured around two principles:
- All applications and operating system states are stored in tables in a distributed database.
- Access to states can only be done through database transactions.
Their operating system consists of four levels:
- User applications
- Filesystem/Scheduler/IPC/other OS services
- Distributed DBMS
- Microkernel Services
A free test is possible
With DBOS, operating system services are coded in SQL on the distributed DBMS, which is very different from the traditional method of running the database management system in user space on top of the system operating.
After creating a working prototype of DBOS, they secured funding and now the operating system is available. You can try it for free or you can contact sales. You can create an account by signing in with your Google account. Once logged in, you will see a getting started page that will tell you how to proceed:
If an application is interrupted, it automatically resumes where it left off
You can install the DBOS SDK on Ubuntu Linux, MacOS or Windows (WSL). It requires Node.js 20 or later and then uses Docker to deploy the application to the operating system.
One of the main advantages of DBOS is runtime reliability: if an application is interrupted, it automatically resumes where it left off.
Of course, the big question is: will businesses be interested in a radically new approach to cloud computing-centric operating systems and moving away from their reliance on Linux?
Source: “ZDNet.com”