Summary:

Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia have created a new operating system called DBOS that uses a distributed database as its core instead of the traditional Linux kernel. They realized that the large scale of modern cloud computing made operating system state management a database problem. DBOS uses FoundationDB as its initial database kernel and allows services to be written in SQL. It provides benefits like time travel debugging and a smaller attack surface compared to Linux. If successful, DBOS could compete with serverless platforms and even replace traditional operating systems.