The history of Kubernetes

Kubernetes and the entire cloud-native scene is moving at breakneck speed, but let's take a moment to reflect on how we got here. It will be a very short journey because Kubernetes came out of Google in June 2014, just a few years ago. When Docker became popular, it changed how people package, distribute, and deploy software. But, it soon became apparent that Docker doesn't scale on its own for large distributed systems. A few orchestration solutions became available, such as Apache Mesos, and later, Docker's own swarm. But, they never measured up to Kubernetes. Kubernetes was conceptually based on Google's Borg system. It brought together the design and technical excellence of a decade of Google engineering, but it was a new open source project. At OSCON 2015, Kubernetes 1.0 was released and the floodgates opened. The growth of Kubernetes, its ecosystem, and the community behind it, was as impressive as its technical excellence.

Kubernetes means helmsman in Greek. You'll notice many nautical terms in the names of Kubernetes-related projects.