Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motoboi | Hacker News Reader

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Although people love to think of Kubernetes as “the thing google runs on that was open sourced”, it is actually a simplified version, written from scratch, based on the same principles of the tool google actually runs on.

On used to run on, because it seems that there is no public information about the new platform after Borg.

As a comparison, Mesos was built with the same goal (open source version inspired on Borg) and made some design choices Kubernetes haven’t.

UPDATE: - I don’t really know why Google spent the effort on building Kubernetes, but I believe it was for Google Cloud. And it needed to be open sourced to form a community.

> On used to run on, because it seems that there is no public information about the new platform after Borg.

I left Google quite a few years ago, but my impression is that Borg is still going strong for many of Google's services. There was an attempt to replace it with a new system named Omega, but that ended up being more of an experiment - some of the findings of which were rolled back into future Borg development.

My understanding is that it's still borg. All the cool features from omega were backported into borg, since they were needed to support (insert product here), and in the end some of the omega team got an OK to write and open-source kubernetes based on the findings from omega.

When I left, the big ongoing project in that space was an effort to replace babysitter (most people in Google do not have to worry about babysitter, and for 98% of the time, I didn't, but the 2% where I needed to meant that I kept myself informed of changes in that space).

Your last sentence with respect to Apache Mesos led me to this previous HN discussion: Apache Mesos to be moved to Attic [1].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713082

I always thought Google built Kubernetes as a commoditize your complement strategy: https://www.gwern.net/Complement

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