Transactional Serverless Computing: PostgreSQL Creator Announces DBOS Cloud

Write for InfoQ

The creators of DBOS have recently introduced DBOS Cloud, a transactional serverless application platform tailored for TypeScript developers. With all state information stored in a highly available DBMS, this new platform assures transactional serverless computing, offering reliable execution alongside so-called "time travel" capabilities.

Dubbed as "the world's first cloud-native operating system" and a "database alternative to Kubernetes", DBOS (DataBase oriented Operating System) implements operating system services in SQL, operating atop a high-performance distributed, transactional, partitioned fault-tolerant database. Michael Stonebraker, computer scientist and a Turing Award laureate, writes:

The idea for DBOS (DataBase oriented Operating System) originated 3 years ago with my realization that the state an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages, etc.) has increased in size by about 6 orders of magnitude since I began using Unix on a PDP-11/40 in 1973. As such, storing the OS state is a database problem. Also, Linux is legacy code at the present time and is having difficulty making forward progress. For example, there is no multi-node version of Linux, requiring people to run an orchestrator such as Kubernetes.

According to the authors, DBOS Cloud automatically logs every step an application takes and each change it makes in the database. Two distinct features of DBOS Cloud are reliable execution and time travel: in the event of an interruption to the code running on a DBOS program, it automatically resumes from the point of interruption without re-executing any previously completed work. Stonebraker adds:

Providing such guarantees yourself is months of work, but in DBOS, they’re built into every program (...) You can step through past executions to reproduce rare bugs and even run new code against historical state.

Furthermore, a "time travel debugger" enables developers to replay any DBOS Cloud trace locally on a laptop, observe past application states, and test code changes. In the future, the team plans to release a time travel functionality for disaster recovery, enabling developers to roll back an application and its data to any previous state. Jeremy Daly, CEO and founder of Ampt, comments:

What makes this super interesting is that the project was founded by Dr. Mike Stonebraker (he created Ingress, PostgreSQL, and VoltDB) and Matei Zaharia, the creator of Apache Spark.

Peter Zaitsev, founder at Percona and open source advocate, agrees but adds:

Mike Stonebraker does not seem to be a big fan of Open Source for his companies in recent years.

While the team has released an open-source DBOS TypeScript SDK, unlike Ingress, PostgreSQL, VoltDB, or Apache Spark, DBOS itself is not open-source. In a thread on Hacker News, Peter Kraft, co-founder at DBOS, explains:

Under the hood of our cloud platform (mostly Go + SQL), we're building on ideas from the academic project to provide new features like reliable execution/time travel, but like a good OS, we want to hide that complexity from users.

A free tier and a programming guide covering idempotency and workflow execution on the serverless computing platform are now available. The free tier offers fixed resources per application (a Firecracker microVM with 512 MB of RAM and 1 vCPU) that scale to zero when not in use.

Related Topics:

• Development
• AI, ML & Data Engineering
• Relational Databases
• Postgres
• Linux
• Transactions
• Cloud Computing
• Operating Systems
• Cloud

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