A decade ago Docker was ascendant and on track to conquer the cloud world, but instead it fell somewhat to the wayside as Kubernetes stole much of its thunder. How did that happen and why is Kubernetes the defacto cloud native standard today?

At an event in Mountain View, California last week sponsored by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), developers and project leaders from the Kubernetes community celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Kubernetes project. The anniversary is not the date of the inception of Kubernetes, but rather of the day the project was formally announced, during a session at Dockercon 2014. During the event there was a series of sessions from some of the original leaders and contributors behind Kubernetes and there was even a somewhat uncomfortable appearance by Docker creator Solomon Hykes.

Kubernetes today runs on all major public clouds and powers a significant amount of IT infrastructure and is also now the basis on which AI and machine learning workloads operate. Kubernetes was also the first project at the CNCF in 2016 and spawned an explosion of projects, with 169 projects at the end of 2023.

“We've kind of grown into this incredible thing over the last 10 years,” Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF  said during the event.  “Kubernetes is the number two highest open source velocity project behind Linux.”

Resistance is futile, how borg inspired  Kubernetes  Kubernetes was not without precedent, the basic ideas have roots in Google's own workload orchestration system known as Borg (which later was succeeded by Omega).

Craig McLuckie, one of the original minds behind Kubernetes and a driving force in the foundation of the CNCF detailed the original business vision. He noted that there was an obvious need for a competitive alternative to Amazon in an open approach.

“Maybe we could do something different and we would start with something where Google had some obvious asymmetric advantages,” McLuckie said. “Could we take a lot of the lessons that we've learned building and running our workloads and actually store them in a project and that's what really got my creative juices flowing and we started to think about the Kubernetes project.”

The original project name wasn't Kubernetes, it was Project Seven. In the fictional Star Trek universe Seven of Nine is the name of a female borg drone that ends up rejoining humanity. McLukcie said that the idea was that Project Seven was a friendlier, more accessible version of Borg.

With the Borg of the Star Trek universe, the goal is to assimilate all forms of life into the collective. As it turns out, Kubernetes is not all that dissimilar as it has integrated all manner of functionality for running workloads. Speaker after speaker during the birthday event remarked on how the open nature enables Kubernetes to grow and expand. Kubernetes doesn't assimilate like the Borg, rather it has become an integration engine, where developers, organization and communities contribute ideas and code that become part of the greater whole.

Why Docker Swarm failed and Kubernetes thrived The success of Kubernetes was never a foregone conclusion. Back in 2014, there were other options for the cloud native future. Among them was Docker Swarm.

Docker is a container technology created by Solomon Hykes and at the time it was growing fast. Docker Swarm was a docker native approach to running multiple containers and providing a platform for orchestration. In 2024, Docker Swarm is a footnote, while Kubernetes dominates.

While Kubernetes grew a very broad and diverse community of contribution, Docker Swarm never truly developed the same type of community.

During the birthday event, Hykes came on stage as part of a fireside chat with former Google staffer Kelsey Hightower. Back in 2016 the two men had a particularly heated exchange on Twitter about standards and Docker. At this point the two seemed to agree that in 2024,

Kubernetes and Docker are seen as very complementary projects

“It's nice that overtime, it ends up that great engineering and the best open source principles just kind of win out,” Hykes said.