Kubernetes – The Origin Story

If you are a tech geek, you must have heard something about Kubernetes. If not, then allow us to walk you through it!

Kubernetes is an open-source cloud system sometimes referred to as K8s. It is used to manage containerized workloads across numerous hosts. It offers fundamental tools for maintaining, scaling and deploying applications.

Kubernetes is based on Google’s fifteen years of experience utilizing a Borg system to manage massive production workloads and the community’s finest practices and ideas.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation hosts Kubernetes (CNCF). If you also want your business to flourish, you should consider joining Kubernetes. Furthermore, you can read the CNCF announcement for further information on the parties involved and the part Kubernetes plays.

Now you know the basics, let’s move on to the history of Kubernetes and the origin of its name.

Origins Of Kubernetes

The internal Google Borg System, developed between 2003-2004, is where Kubernetes started. Later in 2013, Google unveiled Omega, a scalable, flexible scheduler for massive compute clusters. McLuckie, Burns, and Beda set out to create a “minimally feasible orchestrator” in the same year. For the orchestrator, the following attributes were ideal:

• Replication: to distribute numerous instances of a program
• Service discovery and load balancing: for routing traffic to duplicated containers
• Basic health inspection and maintenance: to make sure the system is self-healing
• Scheduling: combine multiple machines into one pool and assign tasks to them

Kubernetes now has more than 42,000 users, 500+ meetups globally, and 1800+ contributors, and many of them participate in the public Kubernetes channel on Slack.

Since 2020, Kubernetes has been used by 83% of the businesses examined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

What’s The Story Behind Kubernetes Name?

Have you ever come across the logo that represents Kubernetes? It makes perfect sense that the ship’s wheel depicted in the company’s logo is meant to signify the origin of the company’s name, “Kubernetes,” derived from the ancient Greek phrase “Helmsman,” which refers to a person who leads the ship.

The question then arises regarding the seven sides of the ship’s wheel. Is there also a tale that goes along with it? Yes! The seven spokes of the wheel are a nod to the seven letters originally part of the undertaker’s name.

 The name “Project Seven ” was initially supposed to be given to the Kubernetes technology. The likeable “Star Trek” character Seven of Nine, a Borg race member, inspired this name. On the other hand, Beda, McLuckie, and the rest of their team ultimately decided against using this moniker and instead came up with Kubernetes.

What Is Kubernetes Suitable For?

Kubernetes’ main benefit is that it provides a standardized method for managing and deploying containerized applications across distributed networks of compute nodes, which is especially useful when preparing apps for the cloud.

More generally, it enables you to ultimately deploy and depend on a container-based architecture in production settings. Kubernetes is a container management solution that allows you to automate many of the same functions that other application platforms and management systems provide, but with your containers instead.

Additionally, Kubernetes patterns allow developers to build cloud-native apps on the Kubernetes runtime platform. A Kubernetes developer cannot create container-based apps or services without the aid of patterns.

Other than this, Kubernetes allows you to:

• Manage containers across various hosts
• Update deployments of applications
• Improve how you use the hardware to get the most out of the resources you need for your business apps
• To use stateful apps, mount the storage, and add more
• Scale resources for containerized apps instantly
• Your apps can self-diagnose and repair themselves using auto-restart, auto-placement, autoscaling, and auto-replication
• Declaratively managing services ensures that deployed applications always operate in the manner in which you planned

Benefits Of Using Kubernetes

Users are provided with the ability to deploy and manage applications in the cloud at a massive scale when utilizing Kubernetes, which is a sophisticated solution. It can increase productivity when it is appropriately executed because it can improve the reliability and effectiveness of your applications.

In a nutshell, it helps in the following areas:

• Increased productiveness
• Building more reliable applications
• You won’t have to worry about downtime if you use Kubernetes to manage your rolling software updates.
• Because Kubernetes can automate its self-healing, it helps development teams save time and drastically cuts the danger of experiencing downtime
• Future-proofed systems
• Possible cost savings in comparison to the alternatives
• The ability to scale operations automatically makes it the most cost-effective choice for large systems but not for small applications
• Results in high utilization, which prevents you from having to pay for services that you do not make use of

As your system expands, you will be able to scale both your software and the teams working on it since Kubernetes promotes the use of decoupled designs. Because it was designed to support extensive systems, it can accommodate rapid expansion.

Additionally, it is supported by all of the major cloud vendors, giving you additional options to choose from as a result.

Additionally, most of the K8s ecosystem’s resources can be accessed at no cost since they are open-source. Therefore, use Kubernetes to establish a positive reputation for your company at no charge.

Conclusion

As the cloud-native industry continues to expand, many companies will be interested in cloud-computing solutions because of the elasticity they provide.

Using containers, which make application workloads more easily portable and facilitate the delivery of those workloads more quickly, is an integral part of the elastic cloud architecture.

Even though these paradigms have helped solve many problems, they have also generated new administrative complexity at a big scale, necessitating the automated orchestration that K8s provides.

To our recollection, Kubernetes is the only infrastructure solution that has garnered as much attention and has been adopted at the same rate. K8s is open source, reliable, robust, and years ahead of the competition, so its widespread use will likely continue for a long time.