For back-end systems and distributed systems, I'd love to work on a new OS based on a microkernel and capabilities. Ditch Linux+Docker+Kubernetes, replace that with a microkernel that has a minimal set of modules to multiplex storage and networking, build an orchestrator directly on that that schedules processes as micro-VMs. In those VMs, we could run a stripped-down Linux kernel to handle legacy applications, but probaly we would want to design a few standardized abstractions for accessing other components of the system (storage, databases, queues, RPCs, the scheduler itself) as network services which we would use to implement more modern services. In many cases we could just leverage existing protocols that are built over HTTP (e.g. S3 for object storage). The scheduler would be aware of the dependencies of each services (i.e. the other services that it needs to call to function) and could have the task of directly connecting those things together. To contact one of its dependent services, a service or application would no longer use a hostname+port (resolving the hostname using DNS), it would just directly have a file descriptor to a socket or pipe or whatever kind of RPC interface that the OS directly maps to the corresponding service, either locally or on another node of the distributed system.
If you are aware of anyone working on something like this, please let me know!
If you are aware of anyone working on something like this, please let me know!