Dev Meeting 001: Kubernetes is a Framework

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (K8s) is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerised workloads and services. It supports declarative configuration and automation. Google open-sourced the project in 2014, building on over 15 years of experience running production workloads at scale.

The name originates from Greek, meaning "helmsman" or "pilot." K8s is shorthand — counting the eight letters between "K" and "s."

Google's Problem with Scale

• Google ran millions of data jobs across datacenters — for search, indexing, and analytics
• As the business expanded, managing multiple tenants and diverse workloads became increasingly difficult
• They needed a standard way to schedule resources automatically at massive scale

This led to Borg, Google's internal cluster manager — the direct predecessor to Kubernetes.

How Kubernetes Was Born

• Google extracted its resource management approach from Borg into an open-source project
• Together with Intel and Red Hat, they founded the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• CNCF became the governance body standardising container orchestration and the broader cloud-native ecosystem
• Kubernetes quickly became the industry standard for deploying and managing containers

Summary

Many thanks to Marcin Karkocha for presenting on Kubernetes at our Dev Meeting. The live demo showed theory in action — deploying and scaling containers in real time.