A Brief History of Kubernetes - Taking a Look Back

In my role, I often talk about Kuberenetes in terms of how the technology works but also the upstream business value that can be achieved from adopting it. 

2019 marks the 5 year anniversary since Kuberenetes was announced at DockerCon. In that short period of time it has matured rapidly and become the de-facto container orchestration solution used by many organization. As such, I thought it would be useful to share a brief history of where this revolutionary technology started:

1. In 2003; BORG was created by Google to schedule, run & manage many of their services
2. Process Containers were introduced because process management didn’t scale well
3. CGroups were formed from these
4. CGroups are now the foundation for container technology
5. In 2008 Linux containers began adopting container terminology 
6. Linux containers is then what docker was built upon
7. In 2009 Google created Omega Project to improve the BORG ecosystem
8. The primitives created from Omega Project then carried through in to kubernetes, such as the scheduling unit eventually becoming what we know as Kubernetes Pods
9. In March 2013 Docker was released as open-source
10. Docker were the first to make it really easy to run/configure/share containers on a single host
11. The next stop was to do this across multiple hosts so that scale could be achieved
12. At the end of 2013 Project7 was proposed inside Google to create a container management & orchestration solution to lay the foundation for the future of "Cloud".
13. Project7 project name was based on a Startrek character - You will see the Kuberenetes logo has seven sides
14. In 2014 - Kubernetes was announced at Docker Con by Google. Following this; RedHat, Docker and coreOS quickly joined the community which lead to the first Kubernetes Contributor Conference 
15. In 2015 version 1.0 of Kubernetes released
16. Later in 2015 was first KubeCon event was launched and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) group was formed
17. In 2016; the first SIG (special interest group) was formed
18. In 2017; the Custom Resource Definition (CRD) API was introduced. This feature allowed you to define your own Kubernetes style API; A way to extend, build and customize things on top of Kubernetes. RBAC was also introduced and major cloud providers started announcing native support for Kubernetes 
19. Kubernetes is now recognized as the de-facto container orchestration engine
20. In 2018; Kubernetes was the first project to graduate from CNCF incubation 
21. Kubernetes is the now the # 2 open source project in the world based on pull requests (currently 31,000 contributors) - Linux is # 1!
22. 2019 marks the 5 year anniversary since the 2014 DockerCon Kubernetes announcement 

Along with the rest of the Kubernetes, I am incredibly interested to see where this technology ends up in the future!