  Current operating systems are complex systems that were designed before
today's computing environments. This makes it difficult for them to meet the
scalability, heterogeneity, availability, and security challenges in current
cloud and parallel computing environments. To address these problems, we
propose a radically new OS design based on data-centric architecture: all
operating system state should be represented uniformly as database tables, and
operations on this state should be made via queries from otherwise stateless
tasks. This design makes it easy to scale and evolve the OS without
whole-system refactoring, inspect and debug system state, upgrade components
without downtime, manage decisions using machine learning, and implement
sophisticated security features. We discuss how a database OS (DBOS) can
improve the programmability and performance of many of today's most important
applications and propose a plan for the development of a DBOS proof of concept.
