So my understanding is that they're aligning the workflow progression unit and the database commit unit on a one-to-one basis. In other words, each step in the workflow becomes a database commit unit. That's why the outbox pattern gets simplified. But in exchange, the database itself becomes tightly coupled to the workflow, which will make it architecturally difficult to separate later on. Although, to be fair, I almost never actually need to separate the database anyway.
In most services, I often swap out the message broker or the workflow engine, but the database almost always stays the same.
I'm not sure if I've understood this correctly.
Yes, the core design is building a workflow system on a database--essentially, replacing the central orchestrator most workflow systems use with a Postgres database. This previous blog post goes into more detail: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/postgres-is-all-you-need-for-durab... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313530)
I'm glad you mentioned DBOS. I personally think DB based OS or more accurately data-centric OS is the way to go to simplify all the distributed applications (I'm looking at you Kafka!).
In addition to DBOS please check the original data-centric OS proposed by the MIT team based on D4M technology. This new architecture data-centric OS similar to TabulaROSA in concept where data is managed and governed by mathematical relationship in this case associative array based D4M [1],[2].
This concept can be implemented initially on Linux without introducing a totally new OS unless you wanted to (read: VC money to burn), but it's not necessary like DBOS. This is possible now because starting kernel 7.0 Linux support generic non-conventional kernel bypass for memory, storage and compute with io_uring, eBPF and BPF Arena for examples [3].
[1] D4M:
https://d4m.mit.edu/
[2] TabulaROSA: Tabular Operating System Architecture for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous Compute Engines [PDF]:
hmhttps://web.mit.edu/ha22286/www/papers/HPEC18.pdf
[3] BPF comes to io_uring at last:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1062286/
thanks!!