While all of this was happening, and even before, Google was using Linux containers to run most of its services at a massive scale. Google has been deploying billions of containers per week for as long as anyone can remember

Borg

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.

OS of the cloud

“Abstracting and commoditizing infrastructure” is a fancy way of saying that Kubernetes makes it so you don’t have to worry which cloud or servers your applications are running on. In fact, this is at the heart of the idea that Kubernetes is the operating system (OS) of the cloud. So, in the same way, Linux and Windows mean you do not have to care if your applications are running on Dell, Cisco, HPE, or Nigel Poulton servers. Using Kubernetes means that you do not have to care if your applications are running on AWS or Nigel Poulton’s cloud.

Abstracting clouds meant that Kubernetes presented an opportunity for the technology industry to wipe out the value of AWS. You can just write your applications to run on Kubernetes, and it will make no difference whose cloud is underneath. Thanks to Kubernetes, the playing field has been leveled.

This is why every vendor is in love with Kubernetes and places it front-and-center in their offerings. This ensures that Kubernetes has a strong, bright, and long future which in turn gives the user community a safe and vendor-neutral horse to bet their cloud future on.