The way it could be different this time is that we have arrived at "The Network is the Computer" age. A datacenter running Facebook can look like one giant comp

The way it could be different this time is that we have arrived at "The Network is the Computer" age. A datacenter running Facebook can look like one giant computer, so it could make sense to have a distributed operating system to run that on with a distributed database under it. Of course this effort may be unrelated to this view.