The real question is do operating systems really matter any longer? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because containers are still a common technology for developing microservices and therefore an operating system is required. No, because as the architecture matures, more and more managed cloud services will be leveraged with serverless as a core component of cloud native architecture. Because managing the operations and licensing of operating systems can add up fast, mature cloud native companies limit their use to only legacy workloads and areas that still require specific libraries to be installed.

Since the cloud is an API-driven environment, the definition of operating systems is changing somewhat. Of course, virtual instances and containers still require operating systems. However, the full-scale cloud environment itself is turning into an operating system of sorts. Microservices, events, containers, and vendor managed services are now intercommunicating via API service calls, object storage, and other decoupled methods. This trend to think of the cloud, and the cloud native workloads that are deployed there, as a large scale operating system is going to continue to grow in popularity.