The Borg Heritage

What primarily distinguishes Kubernetes from other systems is its heritage. Kubernetes is inspired by Borg - the internal system used by Google to manage its applications (e.g., Gmail, Apps, GCE).

With Google pouring the valuable lessons they learned from writing and operating Borg for over 15 years into Kubernetes, this makes Kubernetes a safe choice when having to decide on what system to use to manage containers. While a powerful tool, part of the current growth in Kubernetes is making it easier to work with and handle workloads not found in a Google data center.

To learn more about the ideas behind Kubernetes, you can read the "Large-Scale Cluster Management at Google with Borg" paper.

Borg has inspired current data center systems, as well as the underlying technologies used in container runtime today. Google contributed cgroups to the Linux kernel in 2007; it limits the resources used by collection of processes. Both cgroups and Linux namespaces are at the heart of containers today, including Docker.

Mesos was inspired by discussions with Google when Borg was still a secret. Indeed, Mesos builds a multi-level scheduler, which aims to better use a data center cluster.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation embraces the twelve-factor application principles. These principles provide great guidance to build web applications that can scale easily, can be deployed in the cloud, and whose build is automated. Borg and Kubernetes address these principles as well.