At the end of March 2024, Mike Stonebraker announced in a blog post the release of DBOS Cloud, “a transactional serverless computing platform, made possible by a revolutionary new operating system, DBOS, that implements OS services on top of a distributed database.” That sounds odd, to put it mildly, but it makes more sense when you read the origin story: 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 magnitu ..read more

Buzz is building around the idea that it’s time to claw back our cloud services and once more rebuild the company data center. Repatriation. It’s the act of moving work out of cloud and back to on-premises or self-managed hardware. And the primary justification for this movement is straightforward, especially in a time of economic downturn. Save money by not using AWS, Azure, or the other cloud hosting services. Save money by building and managing your own infrastructure. Since an Andreesen Horowitz post catapulted this idea into the spotlight a couple of years ago, it seems to be gaining mome ..read more

PostgreSQL pioneer Mike Stonebraker and Spark creator Matei Zaharia, along with other computer scientists at MIT and Stanford have come up with a new database-oriented operating system (DBOS) to help development of greenfield web applications. They have set up a company, DBOS Inc., to make the OS available to developers. Its first product, DBOS Cloud, launched Tuesday, is a transactional serverless application platform, also sometimes defined as functions-as-a-service (FaaS). It is offered via Amazon Web Services (AWS) using the open-source virtual machine monitoring service Firecracker and is ..read more

Kubernetes has become the de facto way to schedule and manage services in medium and large enterprises. Coupled with the microservice design pattern, it has proved to be a useful tool for managing everything from websites to data processing pipelines. But the ecosystem at large agrees that Kubernetes has a cost problem. Unfortunately, the predominant way to cut costs is itself a liability. The problem is not Kubernetes. The problem is the way we build applications. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

The recent evolution of .NET has been fun to watch. Since .NET became an open-source platform, it has finally delivered on its cross-platform promise. At the same time, support for Linux has given it more traction in the cloud-native space, with the latest releases supporting container runtimes. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

There might be few takers for Pinecone’s new serverless vector database, dubbed Pinecone Serverless, analysts believe. “Why set up and administer a separate database—even one with the advantages of serverless scalability—if you can get the same functionality from the database you are already using and in which you are already managing your data?”, said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.   [ Also on InfoWorld: 14 popular AI algorithms and their uses ] Other than mainstream vector databases, such as Milvus, Weaviate, and Chroma, vector embedding and search features ..read more

The serverless database continues to gain traction across the industry, generating a lot of hype along the way. And why not? The idea that an application developer starting on a new project can provision a database, not worry about sizing compute and storage, or fine-tuning database configurations, and really only needs a general sense of workload pattern and transaction volume to approximate cost is a very enticing proposition. Plus, some might even see very strong potential to reduce the TCO of the database system. As the theme around cloud cost management continues to percolate, the elastic ..read more

Oracle has introduced GraalOS, a high-performance serverless Java-based application deployment technology that promises to help developers improve application responsiveness and cut costs. GraalOS uses GraalVM Native Image technology to compile Java code to a standalone executable, leveraging x64 and AArch 64 processors on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Applications powered by GraalOS should require significantly less memory, thanks to Native Image ahead-of-time compilation, and be less expensive to operate, Oracle said. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

You’re in the early stages of developing a few net-new cloud-based inventory and supply chain management systems. In the first few meetings, you start to feel uneasy: Technology is being discussed way too early in the process. The signs are unmistakable. Your team is not focusing on core requirements or defining the business case. Instead, people are talking about newer technology trends, such as containers and serverless. I’m picking on these technologies specifically, but it could be any technology for that matter, including generative AI, edge computing, or any new topic spotlighted at ..read more

PostgreSQL has been hot for years, but that hotness can also be a challenge for enterprises looking to pick between a host of competing vendors. As enterprises look to move off expensive, legacy relational database management systems (RDBMS) but still want to stick with an RDBMS, open source PostgreSQL is an attractive, less-expensive alternative. But which PostgreSQL? AWS was once the obvious default with two managed PostgreSQL services (Aurora and RDS), but now there’s Microsoft, Google, Aiven, TimeScale, Crunchy Data, EDB, Neon, and more. In an interview with the founder and CEO of Neon Nik ..read more