Scheduling and managing these billions of containers was a proprietary internal Google tool called Borg. Google being Google, they learned a bunch of lessons using Borg and built a newer system called Omega.

Anyway, some of the folks working at Google wanted to take the lessons learned from Borg and Omega, build something better, and make that open-source and available to the community. And that is how Kubernetes came into existence in the summer of 2014.

Kubernetes is not an open-source version of Borg or Omega. It is a new project built, from scratch, to be an open-source orchestrator of containerized applications.

Open source orchestrator

Now, let us go back to the story of AWS eating everyone’s lunch.

When Google open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014, Docker was taking the world by storm. As a result, Kubernetes was seen primarily as a tool to help us manage the explosive growth of containers. While that’s true, it’s only half the story. Kubernetes also does an amazing job of abstracting underlying cloud and server infrastructure. This basically allowed Kubernetize to commoditize infrastructure.

Give that last sentence a few seconds to settle in.