The lack of vertical integration in the modern stack is surprising. We’ve spent 30 years treating the UNIX paradigm as the "end of history," while burying ourselves in layers that add zero mechanical value.

I initially thought the containerization movement of the early 2010s would be the first step toward redefining the OS—a way to finally slim things down. Instead, it just became a more efficient way to pack up the same baggage. We created a "reduction" in deployment complexity, but we haven't seen a continued effort to use those tools to actually change the paradigm.

I expected vertically integrated systems to become the norm by now—where building an executable would be an experience similar to containerization, but resulting in a lean, data-centric unikernel.

Instead, we are burning CAPEX on YAML sidecars in K8s clusters and N-tier abstractions that exist solely due to the large heterogeneity of the deployments that they never should have entered in the first place. We are spending more energy on the friction between layers than on the actual business of computation.

I was hoping for a return to sanity with the DBOS [1] research, looked like an attempt to rethink systems from first principles. But it seems that effort hasn't fully kicked off in the way the industry desperately needs.

[1]: https://dsail.csail.mit.edu/index.php/dbos/