Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the operating system was the computer. If you wanted to run a program, manage users, allocate memory, connect to a network, or read a file, you did it through the OS. Microsoft understood this. They built an empire by controlling the layer that everything else relied on.

But today, most developers have no idea what OS their app is running on. And they don’t need to.

Because the operating system has moved up a level.

It’s not the kernel anymore. It’s the cloud platform.

From kernel to control plane

The things we used to do through the OS — process management, file I/O, authentication, service discovery — are now handled by cloud APIs, control planes, and managed services.

Here’s the shift:

Classical OS Role Modern Cloud Equivalent
fork() and scheduler Kubernetes pod scheduling
init, systemd Terraform, Helm, GitOps
File systems S3, Azure Blob, GCS
Auth and users IAM roles, service accounts
Logging and metrics CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Prometheus
Networking VPCs, overlay meshes, SDN
Software packages Docker images, Helm charts
Shell/CLI Cloud CLI, API calls, pipelines

You don’t boot a box and run daemons anymore. You define resources as YAML and the cloud’s control plane boots and orchestrates them for you.

The illusion of Linux

Yes, Linux is everywhere underneath. Containers run on Linux. Most workloads in the cloud use Linux-based VMs. Microsoft even built its own distro (CBL-Mariner). But the developer, the operator, even the SRE often doesn’t care.

The same way most people forgot what CPU architecture they were on, we’re forgetting what OS we’re on. What matters is the platform around it — the abstraction that gives you compute, storage, auth, observability, and scaling.

Microsoft figured it out

It seems ironic that Microsoft, once the gatekeeper of the OS, is now fully embracing Linux and open source. But they haven’t lost control. They just moved it up the stack.

Azure is the new OS. You don’t buy Windows licenses. You rent runtime, storage, identity, pipelines. You live in GitHub, VSCode, Copilot, and AKS. Microsoft makes money from all of it.

The same applies to AWS, GCP, and increasingly niche providers too. They’re all acting like operating systems now — just not the kind you download and install on your individual local machines.

Why this matters

For infra engineers, platform folks, and anyone building tools in 2025, the skills that used to belong to “sysadmins” or “kernel devs” now live in a different form:

  • Instead of strace, you need tracing across microservices.
  • Instead of ps and top, you need observability tooling that works across containers and nodes.
  • Instead of writing init scripts, you write operators, controllers, and infra-as-code.

The primitives changed. The job hasn’t.

Final thought

If you treat cloud as the new OS, you stop treating AWS and Azure as voodoo, and start seeing them as schedulers, filesystems, RPC brokers, and permission managers. They are built at global scale, but they are still just systems.

Once you learn the new syscall table, you’re back in control.