Understanding the history of Kubernetes
To finish this chapter, let's discuss the history of the Kubernetes project. It will be really useful for you to understand the context in which the Kubernetes project started and the people who are keeping this project alive.
Understanding how and where Kubernetes started
Kubernetes started as an internal project at Google. Since its founding in 1998, Google gained huge experience in managing high-demanding workloads at scale, especially container-based workloads. Today, in addition to Google, Amazon and Microsoft are also releasing a lot of open source and commercial software to allow smaller companies to benefit from their experience of managing cloud-native applications. Kubernetes is one example of this open source software that has been released by Google.
At Google, everything has been developed as Linux containers since the mid-2000s. The company understood the benefit of using containers long before Docker made them simple to use for the general public. Essentially, everything at Google runs as a container. And they are undoubtedly the first to have felt the need to develop an orchestrator that would allow them to manage their container-based resources along with the machines that launch them. This project is called Borg, and you can consider it to be the ancestor of Kubernetes. Another container orchestrator project, called Omega, was then started by Google in order to improve the architecture of Borg to make it easier to extend and become more robust. Many of the improvements brought by Omega were later merged into Borg.
Important Note
Borg is actually not the ancestor of Kubernetes because the project is not dead and is still in use at Google. It would be more appropriate to say that a lot of ideas from Borg were actually reused to make Kubernetes. Bear in mind that Kubernetes is not Borg nor Omega. Borg was built in C++ and Kubernetes in Go. In fact, they are two entirely different projects, but one is heavily inspired by the other. This is important to understand: Borg and Omega are two internal Google projects. They were not built for the public.
As the interest in containers became greater during the early 2010s, Google decided to develop and release a third container orchestrator. This time, it was meant to be an open source one that was built for the public. Therefore, Kubernetes was born and would eventually be released in 2014.
Kubernetes was developed with the experience gained by Google to manage containers in production. Most importantly, it inherited Borg and Omega's ideas, concepts, and architectures. Here is a brief list of ideas and concepts taken from Borg and Omega, which have now been implemented in Kubernetes:
- The concept of pods to manage your containers: Kubernetes uses a logical object, called a pod, to create, update, and delete your containers.
- Each pod has its own IP address in the cluster.
- There are distributed components that all watch the central Kubernetes API in order to retrieve the cluster state.
- There is internal load balancing between pods and services.
- Labels and selectors are two metadata used together to build interaction between Kubernetes
That's why Kubernetes is so powerful when it comes to managing containers in production at scale: in fact, the concepts you'll learn in Kubernetes are older than Kubernetes itself. They have existed for more than a decade, running Google's entire infrastructure as part of Borg and Omega. So, although Kubernetes is a young project, it was built on solid foundations.
Who manages Kubernetes today?
Kubernetes is no longer maintained by Google. They gave Kubernetes to an organization called Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is a big consortium whose goal is to promote the usage of container technologies. This happened in 2018.
Google is a founding member of CNCF along with companies such as Cisco, Red Hat, and Intel. The Kubernetes source code itself is hosted on GitHub and is an extremely active project on the platform. The code is under License Apache version 2.0, which is a permissive open source license. You won't have to pay in order to use Kubernetes, as the software is available for free, and if you are good at coding with Go, you can even contribute to the code.
Where is Kubernetes today?
Kubernetes has a lot of competitors, and some of them are open source, too. Others are bound to a specific cloud provider. We can name a few, as follows:
- Apache Mesos
- Hashicorp Nomad
- Docker Swarm
- Amazon ECS
These container orchestrators all have their pros and cons, but it's fair to say that Kubernetes is, by far, the most popular of them all.
Kubernetes has won the fight of popularity and adoption and is really about to become the de facto standard way of deploying container-based workloads in production. As its immense growth made it one of the hottest topics in IT industry, it has become crucial for cloud providers to come up with a Kubernetes offering as part of their services. Therefore, Kubernetes is supported almost everywhere now.
The following Kubernetes-based services can help you to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running with just a few clicks:
- Google GKE
- Amazon EKS
- Microsoft Azure AKS
- Alibaba ACK
It's not just about the cloud offerings. It's also about the Platform-as-a-Service market. Recently, Red Hat OpenShift decided to rewrite their entire platform to rebuild it on Kubernetes. Now they are offering a complete set of enterprise tools to build, deploy, and manage Docker containers entirely on top of Kubernetes. In addition to this, other projects such as Rancher were built as Kubernetes distributions to offer a complete set of tools around the Kubernetes orchestrator, whereas projects such as Knative offers to manage serverless workloads with the Kubernetes orchestrator.
Important Note
AWS is an exception because it has two container orchestrator services. The first one is Amazon ECS, which is entirely made by AWS and is a competitor to Kubernetes. The second one is Amazon EKS, which was released later than the first one and is a complete Kubernetes offering on AWS. These services are not the same, so do not be misguided by their similar names.
Learning Kubernetes today is one of the smartest decisions you can take if you are into managing cloud-native applications in production. Kubernetes is evolving rapidly, and there is no reason to think why its growth would stop.
By mastering this wonderful tool, you'll get one of the hottest skills being searched for in the IT industry today. I hope you are now convinced!
