A Way Forward: Enabling Operating System Innovation in the Cloud

Cloud computing has not resulted in a fundamental change to the underlying operating systems. Rather, distributed applications are built over middleware that provides high-level abstractions to exploit the cloud’s scale and elasticity. This middleware conjoins many general purpose OS instances. Others have demonstrated that a new operating system built specifically for the cloud can achieve increased efficiency, scale and functionality [11, 14]. However, this work does not take into account the way applications are being deployed in cloud environments. In particular, entire physical or virtual machines are being dedicated to run a single application, rather than concurrently supporting many users and multiple applications. In this paper we introduce a new model for distributed applications that embraces a reduced role of the OS in the cloud. It allows for the construction of application-driven compositions of OS functionality wherein each application can employ its own customized operating system.