Why Are We Using Patchworked Infrastructure? Introducing: DBOS’s Cloud-Native Operating System

We’re excited to announce Construct’s Seed investment in DBOS.

Almost every modern, connected industry today relies heavily on transactional systems for their daily operations, from processing payments and managing supply chains to tracking inventory and updating patient records. However, the technology underpinning these critical applications is hamstrung with a paperclip and rubber band approach from years of iterative improvements. We invested in DBOS, a new startup based on years of research by Mike Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia, to introduce a new cloud-native operating system that improves reliability, resilience and security, for modern applications, starting with the transaction system.

The backbone of much of today's transactional software is built on Linux. As DBOS co-founder and MIT Professor Michael Stonebraker likes to point out, Linux was invented over 30 years ago — this was before the internet was even commercially accessible and when compute power was measured in kilobytes. Since then, the advent of our cloud-first reality has necessitated adaptations such as Kubernetes for application instancing and tools like Splunk for observability. Yet, these are ultimately reactive solutions, patchworking complex development environments, slowing pace of progress, and ballooning development costs.

The answer to the challenges faced by cloud-native applications lies not in further patching but in a fundamental reinvention of the application stack's core. The team at DBOS has completely rethought transactional application development from the ground up. At its core, DBOS is a new operating system that leverages a distributed database as its data store, introducing a host of advantages that were previously out of reach. When building on DBOS, developers and companies get:

• Simplicity: Stateful, serverless app development simplifies the process of building applications, eliminating the need for Kubernetes or container management.
• Reliability: Built-in services workflow orchestration executes the most essential “Once and Only Once” transactions with automatic recovery.
• Easy Debugging: Offers developers the unprecedented ability to "travel back in time" to provide resilience against errors or malicious code.
• Cyber-Resilience: Simplifies observability by rolling back OS and application state to before any disaster, and then replays everything except the problematic transactions. The OS stores all metrics, logs, traces in encrypted SQL-accessible tables.

The creation of DBOS is the culmination of years of research by a team of distinguished technologists and company builders. Co-founded by Professor Michael Stonebraker of MIT, inventor of postgres and a Turing Award winner, and Matei Zaharia of Databricks, DBOS is directly at the intersection of their combined work in modern databases and high performance cloud computing. The founding team includes Christos Kozyrakis, Peter Kraft, Qian Li, and Andy Palmer, and they are joined by strong operators such as Chuck Bear and Michael Coden.

At Construct, everything we invest in has the capability to completely transform and catapult the very important, foundational industries of our economy into the next technological era. DBOS’s solution will be hugely impactful for the thousands of modern, critical applications that NEED to be built and for the billions of dollars of software spend in manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, and other real world industries where the reliability and security of the applications are paramount.

Construct co-led DBOS’s $8.5 million Seed financing with The Engine, and we’re honored to partner with the DBOS team on their journey of building a huge company and core technology development.

The DBOS Cloud is now available, following the launch of their SDK a couple months ago. Developers and companies interested in building on DBOS can sign up or learn more here: https://www.dbos.dev/dbos-cloud