Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform. The origin of Kubernetes lies some‐ where in the Google data centers where Google’s internal container orchestration platform, Borg, was born. Google used Borg for many years to run its applications. In 2014, Google decided to transfer its experience with Borg into a new open source project called “Kubernetes” (Greek for “helmsman” or “pilot”), and in 2015, it became the first project donated to the newly founded Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Right from the start, Kubernetes gained a whole community of users, and the number of contributors grew at an incredibly fast pace. Today, Kubernetes is considered one of the most active projects on GitHub. It is probably fair to claim that at the time of this writing, Kubernetes is the most commonly used and feature-rich container orchestration platform. Kubernetes also forms the foundation of other platforms built on top of it. The most prominent of those Platform-as-a-Service systems is Red Hat OpenShift, which provides various additional capabilities to Kubernetes, including ways to build applications within the platform. These are only some of the reasons we chose Kubernetes as the reference platform for the cloud-native patterns in this book.
