From Lone Dwarfs to Giant Superclusters: Rethinking Operating System Abstractions for the Cloud

Unix took a rich smorgasbord of operating system features from its predecessors and pared it down to a small but powerful set of abstractions: files, processes, pipes, and the shell to glue the system together. In the intervening forty years, the common-case computational substrate has evolved from a lone PDP-11 minicomputer to vast clouds of virtualized computational resources. Contemporary distributed systems are being built by adding layer upon layer atop the foundation established by Unix’s chosen abstractions. Unfortunately, the resulting mess has lost the “simplicity, elegance, and ease of use” that was a hallmark of the original Unix design. To cope with distribution at astronomic scale, we must take our operating systems back to the drawing board. We are living in a new world, and it is time to be brave.