Kubernetes was open sourced by Google in 2014. This container orchestration engine is based on Google’s Borg technology that’s been running for many years. Indeed, Google ran Kubernetes for more than 10 years, before containers became hot. Google had been powering its own web services with it.
Putting things into perspective, Kubernetes was actually late to the container cluster manager/orchestration party. As you may recall Apache Mesos first entered the market in 2009. It began as technology without a container role, until those who needed to make containers scale put two and two together.
Despite Kubernetes only being out of beta for a short time, more people now brag about their Kubernetes skills than they do about Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm or Cloud Foundry. Further validating the containers orchestration engine, Microsoft deepened its investment and commitment to Kubernetes in early April with the acquisition of Deis, a Kubernetes services and support startup.
The hype and demand can also be measured by the Stack Overflow questions that mention the different container cluster managers. Indeed, Kubernetes dominated the category, as the chart from Apprenda reflects in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Interest in Kubernetes Versus Other Container Providers