Efficient use of hardware requires operating system components be customized to the application workload. Our general purpose operating systems are ill-suited for this task. We present Genesis, a new operating system that enables per-application customizations for cloud applications. Genesis achieves this through a novel heterogeneous distributed structure, a partitioned object model, and an event-driven execution environment. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of Genesis, and evaluates its ability to improve the performance of common cloud applications. The evaluation of the Genesis prototype demonstrates memcached, run within a VM, can outperform memcached run on an unvirtualized Linux. The prototype evaluation also demonstrates an 14% performance improvement of a V8 JavaScript engine benchmark, and a node.js webserver that achieves a 50% reduction in 99th percentile latency compared to it run on Linux
