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The History of Kubernetes

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Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for running microservices infrastructures. While it may appear that this technology has only recently entered the market, the truth is that Kubernetes history began long before the release of Kubernetes v1.0.0 in 2015. Let's go back in time in this post to learn how Kubernetes evolved from an internal container orchestration solution at Google to the tool we know today.


Kubernetes is a Greek word that means "helmsman" or "pilot." It is also known as K8s which is an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s".


2003-2004: The Beginning of the Borg System

Google had a major issue in the early 2000s. While they still ruled the majority of the digital world, managing Google’s massive architecture of commodity hardware was the issue. Google's infrastructure and application architecture had to be completely redesigned. As a result, Google created a new application orchestration system known as 'Borg.'


Google introduced the Borg System around 2003-2004. It began as a small-scale project, with about 3-4 people working together on a new version of Google's new search engine. Borg developed the large-scale cluster management system required by Google to keep up with the millions of users of their services.


2013: From Borg to Omega

Google introduced the Omega cluster management system after Borg. It was a scalable and flexible scheduler for large compute clusters.


The Borg project was still under wraps at this point in Kubernetes' history. However, another tech startup was developing some truly cutting-edge approaches to application development by this point. We're talking about Docker, as you might have guessed.


Docker was the company that popularized container management around 2013. Seeing the rise of containers as a scalable and efficient method of managing massive workloads, several members of Google's Borg Project decided to make a positive impact. Joe Beda, Brendan Burns, and Craig McLuckie saw a future for some of Borg's more useful elements in the popularity of Docker's containers.


2014: Google Introduces Kubernetes

Borg was about a decade old at this point and had grown significantly over those years. Google introduced Kubernetes as an open source version of Borg in the middle of 2014. After a few months, Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, and Docker have joined the Kubernetes community.


2015:

In the middle of 2015, Kubernetes v1.0 was released. Along with the release, Google formed the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in collaboration with the Linux Foundation. The CNFC's goal is to create a sustainable ecosystems and a community around a collection of high-quality projects that orchestrate containers as part of a microservices architecture. As Kubernetes continued to grow, companies like Deis, OpenShift, Huawei, and Gondor joined the community later this year.


The same year, Kubernetes 1.1 was released, with significant performance improvements, improved tooling, and new features that make applications even easier to build and deploy.


Later this year, the first KubeCon 2015, Kubernetes Community Conference, was held in San Francisco,


2016: Kubernetes Has Gone Mainstream!

Helm (Kubernetes' package manager) released its first version earlier this year. KubeCon EU 2016, the first European Kubernetes conference was held this year.


With the introduction of Kubernetes 1.2 further enhancements have been made like Scalability, simplified application deployment, and automated cluster management.


Minikube, a tool for running Kubernetes locally, was officially released in the middle of this year. Kops, an official Kubernetes project for managing production-grade Kubernetes clusters, was also made available this year.


Kubernetes 1.4 introduces kubeadm, a new tool that aids in the installation of Kubernetes. This release simplifies installation, adds stateful application support with integrated Helm, and introduces new cross-cluster federation features.


With the introduction of Kubernetes 1.5, Containerized multiplatform applications, support for Windows server containers and hyper-V containers, an expanded ecosystem of applications, coverage for heterogeneous data centers, and few more new features were added.


2017: The Business Adoption Year

Later in 2017, Kubernetes expanded and newer versions were released.


GitHub reached a big milestone in 2017 when they started serving all web and API requests by containers running in Kubernetes clusters deployed on their metal cloud.


Oracle joined the CNCF as a platinum member and it open sourced a Kubernetes installer for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and released Kubernetes on Oracle Linux.

2018:

Google launched the Kubernetes Podcast in 2018. Amazon EKS and The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) becomes Generally available.


We're all excited to see where Kubernetes takes us in the future. It was fun and interesting to compile Kubernetes' history. However, we still have a lot to learn about Kubernetes.


So keep an eye out for more exciting stuff in next blogs.


Thank you for reading!


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