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Effective coordination and synchronization between processes remains a challenge that becomes even more important with the rise of multi-core hardware. This thesis introduces Octopus, a coordination service for the Barrelfish operating system. Octopus addresses the problem of coordination be-tween concurrent processes or activities in Barrelfish. The Octopus de-sign is influenced by ideas from distributed computing. We show that these ideas are transferrable to operating systems. We used a declar-ative, logic programming engine to implement parts of the Octopus service and evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. In a case study, we used Octopus to write a service that is responsible for device management and bootstrapping the OS as well as a replace-ment for the Barrelfish name server. Our experience with Octopus has shown that it simplifies programming services that require complex co