The birth of Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open source project that was released by Google in June, 2014. Google released the project as part of an effort to share their own infrastructure and technology advantage with the community at large.

Google launches 2 billion containers a week in their infrastructure and has been using container technology for over a decade. Originally, they were building a system named Borg, now called Omega, to schedule their vast quantities of workloads across their ever-expanding data center footprint. They took many of the lessons they learned over the years and rewrote their existing data center management tool for wide adoption by the rest of the world. The result was the Kubernetes open-source project (you can refer to more details about this in point 3 in the References section at the end of the chapter).

Since its initial release in 2014, K8s has undergone rapid development with contributions all across the open-source community, including Red Hat, VMware, and Canonical. The 1.0 release of Kubernetes went live in July, 2015. Since then, it's been a fast-paced evolution of the project with wide support from one of the largest open-source communities on GitHub today. We'll be covering version 1.5 throughout the book. K8s gives organizations a tool to deal with some of the major operations and management concerns. We will explore how Kubernetes helps deal with resource utilization, high availability, updates, patching, networking, service discovery, monitoring, and logging.