Primer

Google has been running Search and Gmail on billions of containers per week for a lot of years. This is massive scale and they needed help. So, they built a couple of in-house tools called Borg and Omega to help. The rest of the world encountered similar challenges when Docker made containers popular. Even though we weren’t doing things at the same scale as Google, we still needed tools to help. At around the same time that Docker made containers popular, a group of technologists at Google were building a new container orchestration tool. It was based on lessons learned from Borg and Omega, and in 2014 they released it as an open-source project called “Kubernetes”.

So, Kubernetes is a platform for scheduling and managing containers at scale. It brings features such as self-healing, autoscaling, and zero-downtime rolling updates. It was originally built inside of Google and released the community as an open-source project in 2014. Since then, it’s become...