Understanding the history of Kubernetes

Now, let’s discuss the history of the Kubernetes project. It will be 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

Since its founding in 1998, Google has gained huge experience in managing high-demanding workloads at scale, especially container-based workloads. Since the mid-2000s, Google has been at the forefront of developing its applications as Linux containers. Well before Docker simplified container usage for the general public, Google recognized the advantages of containerization, giving rise to an internal project known as Borg. To enhance the architecture of Borg, making it more extensible and robust, Google initiated another container orchestrator project called Omega. Subsequently, several improvements introduced by Omega found their way into the Borg project.

Kubernetes was born as an internal project at Google, and the first commit of Kubernetes was in 2014 by Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, and Craig McLendon, among others. However, Google didn’t open source Kubernetes on its own. It was the efforts of individuals like Clayton Coleman, who was working at Red Hat at the time, and who played a crucial role in championing the idea of open-sourcing Kubernetes and ensuring its success as a community-driven project. Kelsey Hightower, an early Kubernetes champion at CoreOS, became a prominent voice advocating for the technology. Through his work as a speaker, writer, and co-founder of KubeCon, he significantly boosted Kubernetes’ adoption and community growth.

Today, in addition to Google, Red Hat, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies are also contributing to the Kubernetes project actively.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Borg is 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 reused to make Kubernetes. Bear in mind that Kubernetes is not Borg or 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.

Kubernetes was developed with the experience gained by Google to manage containers in production. Most importantly, it inherited Borg’s 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 to retrieve the cluster state.
• There is internal load balancing between Pods and Services.
• Labels and selectors are metadata that are used together to manage and orchestrate resources in 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 from Kubernetes are older than Kubernetes itself. Although Kubernetes is a young project, it was built on solid foundations.

Who manages Kubernetes today?

Kubernetes is no longer maintained by Google because Google handed over operational control of the Kubernetes project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on August 29, 2018. CNCF is a non-profit organization that aims to foster and sustain an open ecosystem of cloud-native technologies.

Google is a founding member of CNCF, along with companies such as Cisco, Red Hat, and Intel. The Kubernetes source code is hosted on GitHub and is an extremely active project on the platform. The Kubernetes code is under Apache License version 2.0, which is a permissive open source license. You won’t have to pay to use Kubernetes, and if you are good at coding with Go, you can even contribute to the code.

Where is Kubernetes today?

In the realm of container orchestration, Kubernetes faces competition from various alternatives, including both open-source solutions and platform-specific offerings. Some notable contenders include:

• Apache Mesos
• HashiCorp Nomad
• Docker Swarm
• Amazon ECS

While each of these orchestrators comes with its own set of advantages and drawbacks, Kubernetes stands out as the most widely adopted and popular choice in the field.

Kubernetes has won the fight for popularity and adoption and has become the standard way of deploying container-based workloads in production. As its immense growth has made it one of the hottest topics in the 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 get a Kubernetes cluster up and running with just a few clicks:

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud Platform
• Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)
• Azure Kubernetes Service on Microsoft Azure
• Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK)

It’s not just about the cloud offerings. It’s also about the Platform-as-a-Service market. Red Hat started incorporating Kubernetes into its OpenShift container platform with the release of OpenShift version 3 in 2015. This marked a significant shift in OpenShift’s architecture, moving from its original design to a Kubernetes-based container orchestration system, providing users with enhanced container management capabilities and offering a complete set of enterprise tools to build, deploy, and manage 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 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. The second one is Amazon EKS, which was released later than ECS and is a complete Kubernetes offering on AWS. These services are not the same, so do not be misguided by their similar names.

Where is Kubernetes going?

Kubernetes isn’t stopping at containers! It’s evolving to manage a wider range of workloads. KubeVirt extends its reach to virtual machines, while integration with AI/ML frameworks such as TensorFlow could allow Kubernetes to orchestrate even machine learning tasks. The future of Kubernetes is one of flexibility, potentially becoming a one-stop platform for managing diverse applications across containers, VMs, and even AI/ML workflows.

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 wonder 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. We hope you are now convinced!

In the next section, we will learn how Kubernetes can simplify operations.