I really enjoy naming things. The naming has a bit of a history. The first version used open flow. We wrote the flows on demand for the connections, and the project's name was 'Minuteman: flows at a moment's notice' as a reference to the soldiers during the revolutionary war that were prepared to fight at a moment's notice.

Although we changed the architecture, we decided to stick with Minuteman. Mesosphere's naming scheme has historically had to do with space. The road to the stars was originally paved by programs such as Minuteman -- Our mission is to orchestrate the data center. You can't do that without networking. Minuteman is our first networking component of many as one of the first components to help pave our way.

More likely a reference to the minutemen of the US Revolutionary War, which the ICBM was also named after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen