Ferenc Hámori co-CEO of RisingStack

When a client asks us to create a highly available distributed system, we usually recommend/use Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a container orchestration / portable cloud platform that is becoming the de-facto standard for running microservices infrastructures in the cloud. Even though there are several competing technologies by now, most of the bigger cloud providers offer managed Kubernetes clusters, making it even easier to adopt it as the foundation of distributed infrastructures.

To tell the story of how Kubernetes evolved from an internal container orchestration solution at Google to the tool that we know today, we dug into the history of it, collected the significant milestones & visualized them on an interactive timeline.

About Kubernetes

Kubernetes can speed up the development process by making easy, automated deployments, updates (rolling-update) and by managing our apps and services with almost zero downtime. Kubernetes is originally developed by Google, it is open-sourced since its launch and managed by a large community of contributors.

If you'd like to learn more about Kubernetes, check out our previous post:

What is Kubernetes & How to Get Started With It

Enjoy the timeline below! For more in-depth explanation & links scroll down a little bit.

The History of Kubernetes

2003-2004: Birth of the Borg System

Google introduced the Borg System around 2003-2004. It started off as a small-scale project, with about 3-4 people initially in collaboration with a new version of Google’s new search engine. Borg was a large-scale internal cluster management system, which ran hundreds of thousands of jobs, from many thousands of different applications, across many clusters, each with up to tens of thousands of machines.

2013: From Borg to Omega

Following Borg, Google introduced the Omega cluster management system, a flexible, scalable scheduler for large compute clusters. (whitepaper and announcement)

2014: Google Introduces Kubernetes

2015: The year of Kube v1.0 & CNCF

2016: The Year Kubernetes Goes Mainstream!

2017: The Year of Enterprise Adoption & Support

2018:

March 2: First Beta Version of Kubernetes 1.10 announced. Users could test the production-ready versions of Kubelet TLS Bootstrapping, API aggregation, and more detailed storage metrics.

First Beta Version of Kubernetes 1.10 announced. Users could test the production-ready versions of Kubelet TLS Bootstrapping, API aggregation, and more detailed storage metrics. May 1: Google launches the Kubernetes Podcast, hosted by Craig Box.

Google launches the Kubernetes Podcast, hosted by Craig Box. May 2-4: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, hosted in Copenhagen. More than 4,300 developers gathered, including Risingstack at the Node Foundation booth:

We just arrived, and super excited for #KubeCon / #CloudNativeCon. ?? Meet us at the @nodejs booth in hall C! pic.twitter.com/IK7GKYg8Pn — RisingStack ? Node.js, K8S & Microservices (@RisingStack) May 2, 2018

Future of Kubernetes

We are looking forward to see where Kubernetes is heading to. Nowadays, there is a growing excitement about ‘serverless’ technologies, and Kubernetes is going in the opposite direction. However, Kubernetes has it’s place in our ‘increasingly serverless’ world. Tools like Kubeless and Fission providing equivalents to functions-as-a-service but running within Kubernetes. These won’t replace the power of Lambda, but show us that there are solutions on the spectrum between serverless and cluster of servers. Read more about the future of k8s on the ThoughtWorks blog.

What's next?

Collecting the history of Kubernetes was fun, but there is a lot more to know about our favorite orchestration engine. Check out the Kubernetes-related articles on our blog, or if you need help, don't hesitate to contact us.

Did I miss anything from the list? Or did you find any inaccuracies? Leave a comment below or find us on Twitter and let us know.