The True Origin of Kubernetes (And Why Google Gave It Away) Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Get around, get comfortable, kids. Tonight, I'm going to read you another bedtime story. You already know Kubernetes. That's exactly why you never asked where it came from. You wrote YAML this week. You know roughly what a pod is. You have been on a call when somebody said, "We'll just put it in the cluster." And everybody just knows it, right? And nobody said out loud what that was going to cost.

00:23 But that is the last 10 minutes of a much much longer story. Before Kubernetes, machines had names. There was a system inside Google that nobody outside Google had ever laid eyes on. There was a genuinely better answer out of Barkley and it lost. And there was a meeting where the man in charge of Google's infrastructure listened to this whole plan and could not believe what he was hearing.

00:51 So tonight I will tell you where Kubernetes actually came from. Why Google gave away the thing it called the competitive advantage and which companies ended up collecting. Once upon a time computers had names. There was a machine called Zeus and a machine called Hera and one called DB Old Do not touch. They were real objects in a real building with stickers on the front.

01:20 You could walk up and put your hand on the one running payroll. They were pets. You named them. You nurse them through every illness. And when one died, somebody took it personally. Deploying meant connecting to a machine you could name and copying files onto it. Maybe a shell script, maybe capistrano or arsync or a wiki page with 14 steps where step nine was ask Dave.

01:48 If a disc died, somebody drove to the building. The knowledge of which box did what lived in two places. That 14step wiki page which was out of date and Dave Dave could not could not go on a holiday. Dave could not get sick. Everybody knew this. And nobody nobody wrote a damn thing down. And because a machine took months to buy, you bought for the worst day of the year.

02:16 So every machine spent most of its life doing almost nothing, waiting for the Christmas sales. Whole rooms of expensive metal idling politely. And yet somehow nobody ever had enough. Every team was always one ticket away from more hardware because the spare capacity was never where you needed it. The payroll machines dozed while the checkout machines were on fire.

02:41 And you could not move one ounce of the first to the second. Different truck, different owner, different purchase order. The entire story I'm about to tell you starts with one company looking at all that idle metal at a scale nobody else on Earth had and deciding it was unacceptable. Before we get to that company, there is one part of this story I'm not going to cover tonight.

03:09 What comes after it? Kubernetes went from a secret inside Google to something every engineer is expected to know. Agents are making the same trip only much faster. And this time, anyone can generate code that looks like they know what they're doing. Showing that you actually do is the hard part. That's where the sponsor of this video comes in. Udacity is a technical education platform part of Accenture built around learning by building with every project reviewed by an experienced mentor.

03:42 Its AI engineering with cloud program for example is about shipping agents to production. The cloud agent SDK and cloud code building your own MCP servers evaluations and observability and guardrails for multi- aent systems. You finish with four projects, including an enterprise code review orchestrator and a portfolio that shows you built them. Check out Udacity through the link in the description.

04:09 Big thanks to Udacity for sponsoring this video. And now, let's get back to that company and what it built. In the early 2000s, Google had the same problem as everybody else, except a thousand times larger. and about 10 years earlier. So they built something to fix it and they called it Borg after the Star Trek Borg the collective the thing that assimilates everything it touches and makes it part of one system.

04:37 B changed the question. You no longer said run this program on that machine. You said what you wanted. This much CPU, this much memory, this many copies, keep it alive. And Borg decided where it went and moved it when it needed to and restarted it when it died and never told you which machine because that was no longer any of your business to you. 10,000 machines were one computer.

05:04 They weren't pets anymore. They were kettle numbered identically and replaced without a funeral. And because none of them belonged to a team, the spare capacity went wherever the fire was. By the time anyone outside could read about it, Borg was running hundreds of thousands of jobs from thousands of different applications across clusters of tens of thousands of machines.

05:28 It packed batch work into the gaps left by serving work. It overcommitted deliberately because it knew nobody uses what they ask for. Those rooms of idling metal at Google were not idling. Then Google tried to build Borg again better from scratch. They called it Omega and it let manyers work on the same cluster at once. Most of its ideas were folded back into Borg.

05:57 The rest one shared the record of the cluster that everything watches and nobody owns would later walk out of the building. And outside Google, nobody had seen Borg. There was no product. There was no paper about Borg. There were job adverts with strange words in them and engineers who left Google and went quiet whenever the conversation got specific and a rumor that somewhere in California there was a way of running computers that made everything the rest of us were doing look like carrying water in our hands.

06:33 Omega got public paper in 2013. Borg, the original, did not get one until April 2015, 10 months after Kubernetes was announced. The outside world read about the rewrite before anyone was allowed to see the original. We met the child first and spent a year guessing what the mother looked like. Around 2009 at Berkeley, a graduate student named Benjamin Hindman was building a way to run a whole cluster of machines as one in the open.

07:08 He called it Messos. And it was elegant in a way that still makes engineers a bit misty. Mess did not try to know what your work needed. Instead, it offered here are some free machines. Do you want them? and your own scheduler, your framework in Mesos language said yes or no. Two levels. Mezos handled the resources. You handled the decisions. That design was more flexible than anything else in existence and it worked.

07:41 Hindman took it to Twitter and the fail whale, the cartoon Twitter showed you every time it fell over, you know, started showing up a lot less. It ran at RBNB. It run pieces of apple. In 2013, Hidman and Tobias Knap and Florian Laidber I think founded Messosphere to sell it. Mezos was first. Meos was proven at a scale nobody nobody could argue with.

08:12 And Meos did not hand you a solution. It handed you a toolkit and a reading list. Because bring your own scheduleuler means you have to bring your own scheduleuler. To actually run a web service, you also needed Marathon. To run scheduled work, you needed Kronos. Twitter brought Aurora. Every one of those was another component to learn, choose, operate, and explain to your boss.

08:37 I worked with Mezos. The company I was at back then was building a product meant to run on top of an orchestrator. And we chose Mezos because everything else was too young. And it worked and it was amazing right up until it wasn't. If id had more money back then, I'd have spent it on a psychiatrist to deal with the nightmares Messos and friends gave me.

09:02 What Mess asked for was an engineering team that wanted to assemble its own orchestration layer out of parts. Twitter had that team. Apple had that team. Most companies didn't. They just wanted to put their applications somewhere and go home. In the autumn of 2013, three people inside Google looked at Amazon and got frightened. Their names were Joe Ba, Brendan Burns, and Craig McClucky.

09:35 What they could see was that Amazon Web Services was turning into something nobody would ever catch. Not by selling better virtual machines because a virtual machine is a virtual machine and Amazon was already there. But they also knew something the rest of us didn't. Google's real advantage was never the machines. It was Borg. It was the way Google run the machines.

09:58 And in 2013, a small company called Docker had just made containers something an ordinary developer could actually use. which meant for the first time that Google's way of running software could be handed to somebody who did not work at Google. What made Google special? The way it run the machines was the one thing it never solved. Kubernetes was the first time it tried.

10:27 Beta Burns and Mcccli started a project and it needed a code name. Borg was already well Borg. They called it project seven after seven of nine. Now seven of nine is a character from Star Trek Poyager. And she is not just any Borg. She is a Borg drawn who gets severed from the collective, cut out of the hive and made to learn how to be a single person in a world that is not the Borg.

10:57 The public name came from Craig McClucky in his car on the way to work. This thing he thought is like steering a container ship. What would you call the helmsman? Kubernetes Greek for helmsmen. When Tim Hawin drew the logo, he drew a ship's wheel with seven spokes. A ship's wheel almost always has an even number of spokes, six or eight or 10. Hawin drew seven.

11:25 Seven spokes. Go and look. It's on every slide, every t-shirt, every confidence badge in this industry, and it has been for more than a decade. They told us exactly what it was. They put the secret in the log in public on day one. And we have been staring straight at it ever since without counting. Before Kubernetes could leave the building, somebody had to say yes.

11:53 That somebody was Urus Hosel, Google's eth employee. and the man responsible for the technical infrastructure underneath everything Google did. They pitched it to him and Hosel said, "So, let me get this straight. You want to build an external version of the Borg taskuler, one of our most important competitive advantages, the one we don't even talk about externally, and on top of that, you want to open source it."

12:20 He was right. That was precisely what the mad bastards wanted to do. The argument that eventually won went something like this. Google could not beat Amazon selling virtual machines, apples to apples. But Amazon's real mode was not price. It was that once your application was built into Amazon's particular shapes, it could not leave. Everybody knew it.

12:50 Everybody was quietly paying for it. So destroy the mode. Give the whole industry one common way to package and run software. The same way everywhere on everyone's hardware and applications become portable. And when applications can leave, Amazon has to compete on the merits all over again on ground Google believed it was better on. You do not win by building a better castle.

13:18 You win by making castles worthless. Give away the thing that is not the business. So the thing that is the business has to be fought for again. Economists call it commoditizing your compliment. It is a genuinely brilliant move. The yes came from a bus. Craig McClucky found himself on a Google shuttle sitting next to Eric Brewer, one of Holes's key strategists.

13:44 And by the end of the ride, Brewer was convinced. Soon after, Hol said yes. Joe Bada made the first comet on the 6th of June 2014. 4 days later, on the 10th of June, Eric Brewer stood up and announced Kubernetes to the world in a keynote at Docker Con, Docker's own conference, Docker's own stage. I was in that room. I would love to tell you I remember the keynote.

14:14 I don't. But what I do remember is the mood. We all use containers and we all needed them in production. And this felt like something built from the ground up for them, for us. Two weeks before Kubernetes was announced, a man at Red called Matt Hicks sent one of his engineers a message. Google wants to know if we are in. The engineer was Clayton Coll.

14:38 He got private access to the code that same day, started cleaning it up and became the first contributor to Kubernetes who did not work for Google and Redka did something genuinely reckless. They had a product called Open Shift. It was a platform as a service. It existed. It had customers and they tore out its insights and rebuilt the whole thing on top of a project that had only just been announced from a competitor with no users.

15:06 Within a year, Redkat was the second largest contributor in the world behind only Google. On the 21st of July 2015, Kubernetes reached version 1.0 and Google let go of it. They donated it to a brand new foundation created that day under the Linux Foundation called the CloudNative Computing Foundation or CNCF. That donation was not generosity. It was the whole plan.

15:35 Nobody adopts a weapon that still belongs to a competitor. A standard owned by Google is just Google's product wearing a hat. Which also meant Google could never take it back and they knew it when they signed it. And then the war which was shorter than people remember. Docker had swarm which was simpler and built right in. Amazon had ECS which was free if you were already on Amazon and most people were.

16:04 Mezos was still there still excellent. Hashi Corp had Nomad. By the end of 2017 it was over. In September, Mezosphere put Kubernetes on its own platform. And in October, Docker announced it would ship Kubernetes inside Docker right next to Swarm. Kubernetes did not win because it was the most elegant. It was the most complicated thing on that list by a distance.

16:30 It won because it was the only one with an entire industry standing behind it. All of them having agreed in a foundation in public that this was the one. The losers settled their affairs one by one. In 2019, Docker sold Swarm along with its whole enterprise business to a company called Mirantis which kept it going for the customers who stayed. That same year, Meosphere renamed itself D2IQ and went to work on Kubernetes.

17:00 And in 2023, it sold what was left to Nutanix. In August 2025, the Apache Foundation retired Mezos. Almost nobody noticed. Amazon had absolutely no reason to help Kubernetes. They had their own answer is yes. And they had the customers and the entire point of Kubernetes was to make their customers portable. Being asked to sell it was like being asked to sell the crowbar.

17:30 So they didn't for years and their customers run Kubernetes on Amazon anyway by hand on row virtual machines wiring up their own control planes paying Amazon for the machines while getting no help whatsoever with the hard part. In November 2017, Amazon gave in and announced EKS. It went generally available the following June. And Microsoft did something even simpler.

17:57 In 2016, they hired Brendan Burns, one of the three people who created it. He said Microsoft was all in on cloud, that it was his hometown team, and that there was something appealing about the company in transition. Azure built AKS into a flagship. In the middle of 2026, 11 years after Google gave Kubernetes away, Amazon was still the biggest cloud on Earth.

18:25 Microsoft was second, Google was third. Right? This part is me, not the record. So take it as one man's reading. The strategy worked. It worked exactly as designed. Locking generally weakened portability generally happened. And the way you package and run software generally did become the same everywhere. Google won the argument. Google set the standard the entire industry now runs on.

18:53 And I would argue GK is still the best managed Kubernetes anybody offers and Google is third. The company the weapon was aimed at is still the biggest cloud on earth and the company in second place hired one of the people who wrote it. You built the crowbar. You handed it out for free on principle to make sure nobody could accuse you of owning it. And then you watched two other companies use it to open doors you were standing outside of.

19:20 Kubernetes today is the part you already know. You got the interface. Declare what you want and a loop somewhere works patiently and forever to make the world match the document. That idea is genuinely beautiful. It came straight out of Borg and Omega. And it is why Kubernetes core API has barely changed since 2015. What you did not get was everything underneath it.

19:47 At Google, Borg was never alone. Bor set on top of Google storage, Google's network, Google's naming and locking service, Google's build system, machines Google designed for itself. And a decade of tooling built by people whose entire job was to keep that fleet healthy. None of that came in the box. None of that could come in the box. What was portable was the shape of the thing.

20:13 The team building Kubernetes knew how Borg had grown. It began as one big monolithic master and over the years everything it didn't do like autoscal and schedule jobs workflows was added around it as separate services. So they built Kubernetes the other way around from the start and the center set the API server Omega's shared record out of the building at last keeping track of what you asked for and nothing else.

20:42 Everything else is a separate piece that watches it and plugs into it. Anything missing could simply be added. It worked. Anything missing was added. Then everything else was added as well. Extensibility is why you have custom resources and operators and an ingress controller you argue about and a service mesh that somebody installed in 2022 who has since left and nobody remembers what the hell it does.

21:08 and a landscape diagram with hundreds of logos on it that gets shown at conferences as evidence of a thriving ecosystem. And it is it is also a map of everything you now have to choose between and it is why you have a platform team at Google. The 20 odd pieces underneath Borg were designed together and kept together by the same people out here. Each of them exists five times over from hundreds of projects that never met each on its own release schedule and somebody has to choose them wire them together and keep them

21:45 working through every upgrade. That somebody is your platform team. Recently the work itself changed shape. Serving a finished model is mostly a web service. Keep it alive. Restart it when it dies. Add copies when it gets busy. Kubernetes is superb at that because Borg was superb at that because that is what Google needed. Training a model is something else.

22:10 A training run is the older kind of work. 512 machines together for 4 days and either they all start or there is no point starting. Kubernetes schedules each piece of your job on its own and gets everything there eventually. That is not a bug. It is the founding idea, but eventually is not a thing a training run can do. You submit a job that needs four machines and three of them start and the fourth sits there saying pending because somebody else took the last GPU.

22:46 And now about a million dollars of silicon is holding perfectly still waiting for a friend. What that job needs is a scheduler that will take all of it or none of it. That is called gang scheduling. It is not new and it is not clever and it has been sitting in a batch scheduler called slarm or slurm since 2002. So the newest, richest, most breathlessly discussed workload in the history of computing went and got itself one of the oldest schedulers in the building.

23:19 A common arrangement in 2026 is slurm for the training and kubernetes for the interface. Some put slurm on top of kubernetes. So kubernetes runs the machines and slurm decides who gets them. Meanwhile, the ecosystem is bolting the missing half phone. Q volcano dynamic resource allocation and kai a scheduler from Nvidia. gang scheduling and topology awareness arriving as additions besides theuler rather than inside it.

23:52 And in December 2025, Nvidia bought the company behind slurm. Train on slurm and youruler is now made by Nvidia. Train on kubernetes and there's a good chance the piece deciding whether your GPU sit idle came from Nvidia as well. Google built the crowbar and watched other people collect. This time the company collecting doesn't even have to choose a side.

24:19 It sells the GPUs to both. Kubernetes did not fall. Nothing in this story is coming for it. It won so completely that it stopped being a decision. It is the floor now and you're standing on it whether you chose it or not. And as far as anyone outside is allowed to know, Borg is still running. Same job, same buildings, 20 odd years in quietly and competently for the only company that ever had everything it needed.

24:50 She never left home. She never had to be everything to everybody. Good night, kids. Your platform team is still assembling the other 20 things. Borg had them in the box.