‘What if the operating system is the problem’: Linux was never made for the cloud – so engineers developed DBOS, a new operating system that’s part operating system, part database
Michael Stonebraker has developed several influential database management systems over the years, including Ingres, PostgreSQL, and VoltDB. Matei Zaharia is the creator of Apache Spark and co-founder and CTO of Databricks.
Working with a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, the two created a revolutionary operating system prototype called DBOS – DataBase OS.
The concept of DBOS emerged three years ago when Stonebraker realized that the state an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages, and so on) has grown exponentially since the early days of Unix. This, combined with Linux’s limitations in the current technological landscape, led to the idea of running the operating system on top of a database.
DBOS cloud
“When I heard a talk from Matei Zaharia in which he said that Databricks could not use traditional OS scheduling technology at the scale they were running and had instead moved to a DBMS solution, it was clear that it was time to upgrade the DBMS to move to the kernel. and build a new operating system,” says Stonebraker.
If The next platform states: “Ultimately, every problem in the ever-evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem. That’s why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?”
DBOS works by encoding operating system services in SQL on a high-performance distributed, transactional, fault-tolerant database management system (DBMS). As Stonebraker says, “This is in contrast to the traditional method of running the DBMS in user space on top of an operating system without DBMS services.”
Created as a joint open source R&D project between MIT and Stanford, the DBOS prototype demonstrated similar performance to Linux, but with the addition of several notable features, including high availability, time travel, transactionality, fault tolerance, built-in multi-node scaling , SQL-accessible system state and observability data, and cyber resilience.
After successfully prototyping DBOS and securing financing, DBOS, Inc. launched in April 2023, the company has now released DBOS Cloud, a transactional serverless platform built on DBOS, designed for stateful TypeScript applications. DBOS Cloud provides key features of DBOS such as reliable execution and time travel.
Reliable execution means that if a DBOS program is interrupted, it automatically picks up where it left off, ensuring no work is repeated and programs always run fully. Time travel allows users to restore an application’s state to any point in the past, making it possible to reproduce rare bugs and execute new code based on a historical state.
DBOS Cloud is now available for everyone to try free.
