Kubernetes History

Celebrating a Decade of Kubernetes in Raleigh

This past June, the tech world marked a major milestone: Kubernetes turned 10! I was lucky enough to join the festivities at a local event here in Raleigh, hosted by the incredible Carlos Santana. Tech enthusiasts from across North Carolina gathered at the stunning new Bandwidth Campus to celebrate this open-source powerhouse.

The event was a fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow techies who share a passion for Kubernetes. We enjoyed trivia, games, and delicious cake, but the real highlight was the insightful discussions that sparked new ideas and perspectives.

Carlos took us on a journey through the Kubernetes git history, even firing up a live demo of Kubernetes 1.0 – something you can actually try yourself here. It was a reminder of how far this project has come since Joe Beda’s very first commit, v0.1.

The energy and enthusiasm at the event were infectious, a testament to the profound impact Kubernetes has had on the tech landscape. Here’s to another decade of innovation and community-driven development!

A Kubernetes Documentary

I stumbled across a really informative documentary about the history of Kubernetes recently on you tube.

The first video, part1, is about the history of Kubernetes and Docker.

The speaker says that around 2013, cloud was becoming increasingly important. Google realized that they needed to participate in this space. AWS was the dominant cloud provider at the time. Google wanted to find a way to compete. They knew that they had good compute technology because everything they had been doing was cloud-first.

Docker came along and it made container technology easy to use. This was a big deal because it meant that people could package their applications in a way that would make them easy to deploy in different environments. Google saw Docker as a way to change the game.

The speaker also talks about the decision to open source Kubernetes. There was a lot of debate about this internally at Google, but ultimately the decision was made to go ahead with it. This was a turning point for Kubernetes, as it allowed it to be adopted by a much wider range of users.

The video ends with the speaker talking about the naming of Kubernetes. They say that they were looking for a name that would be unique and memorable. They eventually came up with the name Kubernetes, which is derived from the Greek word for “helmsman”.

The second video, part2, is about the history of Kubernetes and its competition with Docker Swarm and Mesos.

The speaker, Craig McLuckie, who was an engineer at Google working on Kubernetes, talks about the challenges of open sourcing Kubernetes and the tension between Google and Docker. He also talks about the formation of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to bring together different vendors and technologies.

Here are the key milestones for Kubernetes:

  • June 2014: Kubernetes was announced at DockerCon.
  • June 2015: Kubernetes 1.0 was released at Open Source Cloud Conference (OSCON).
  • June 2017: Docker announced that they would start supporting Kubernetes.
  • Late 2017: Amazon launched a Kubernetes product. According to the speaker, Kubernetes won in part because it had a vast army of contributors and it just kept marching along. Kubernetes is now the de facto standard for container orchestration across all cloud providers globally.