Is it possible to replace Linux as the heart of serverless cloud computing services? That's exactly the intention of a startup consisting of developers from the open source Postgres database project and data management firm Databricks and computer scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley.
The company, DBOS, which announced $8.5 million in seed funding on March 12, aims to simplify the current complicated stack necessary for cloud development by replacing Linux containers with its own data-centric operating system (OS). The OS tracks its state in database tables, natively supports parallelism, and simplifies security by using native database access controls. The focus on data will also allow better compliance and provenance guarantees, with comprehensive logging allowing support for data integrity, according to the company.
The simpler architecture and native logging capabilities of the OS allow for a reduced attack surface area and greater ability to detect anomalies that could indicate an attack, compared to the aging Linux architecture, says Michael Coden, president and co-founder of DBOS.
