Ceres Cortex is a massively scalable operating system delivered entirely as a web service. Every facility of the Cortex kernel is accessible exclusively via a web based application programming interface (API) offered in standard web protocols (SOAP, JSON-RPC, XML-RPC or REST). Cortex also offers a graphical user interface (GUI). However, when used in the graphical mode, the desktop environment resides entirely within a web browser as a web application interacting with the Cortex Host Kernel, which resides on the Internet, exclusively via web services using REST-RPC (REST remote procedure calls).

Cortex is an operating system offered entirely as a service (OSaaS). It is a highly clustered minimalist operating system host kernel offered as a cloud service. The Cortex Grid Services 70 distributes and manages across host kernels across a very large number of machines, making it possible to manage millions of farm organizations optimally, securely and effectively.

Ceres Cortex is a proprietary technology of ExoCortex and not in the public domain.

Comparable Technologies

Although it appears to behave like one, Cortex is neither a Hypervisor nor a network operating system (usually accessed through a remote desktop like VNC, X-terms or RDP). However, Ceres offers a complete web desktop experience that is accessed through any standard browser. The user experience closely emulates that of a Microsoft Windows system. The experience is so similar that if you setup your browser to a full screen mode, (F11 key), it is hard to discern that you are in fact interacting with a browser application. We have chosen to do this to make it easy for a user to transition to Cortex without a huge learning curve.

The Ceres Desktop offers a graphical front-end to all the facilities of the operating system and its hosted applications. However because the operating system itself is accessed via a standard web protocol, the operating system is entirely programmable using any standard language including C++, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP or Perl.

Security

The kernel only provides a minimal set of core facilities and services. The footprint of these services will not change significantly. This ensures that there is a minimal attack surface on the operating system. Ceres is therefore also a highly secure operating system.

Project Profile

• License : Proprietary
• Status : Development
• Next Release : Version 0.9, Narmada (June 2018)

Benefits

• Minimal utilization of hardware resources on the cloud
• Multi-tenant architecture ensures maximum security for each tenant (farm organisations)
• Massively internet scale architecture capable of hosting a millions tenants in a single cluster