Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Google uses Borg internally, and Kubernetes is really their third container orchestration system. After Borg came Omega, which was never deployed, but ended up being a test bed for a lot of innovations that were folded back into Borg. But Borg is a decade old and has a lot of warts (according to its designers), and with Kubernetes they aimed to learn from their mistakes and improve on the design.

As far as I can tell, the aim with Kubernetes was never to replace Borg at Google -- Google is far too invested in Borg, and it would take a considerable engineering effort to migrate away from it. Rather, developers at Google saw an opportunity to create an open source version based on what they had learned and help the world along in adopting the same engineering principles as Google has long practiced. Not all altruistic notions, of course -- Google benefits from the commoditization of containers indirectly, by undermining competitors such as AWS (where containers are still not well-supported) and making their own cloud the best fit for Kubernetes.

Google does run stuff on Kubernetes, via GKE. As I understand it, new products are encouraged to run on GCP. I don't know how many applications they run, however. Maybe someone from Google can comment.




The devs totally forgot that in a normal environment you don't have the 10.000 other internal Google tools, though.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: