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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

What are the three letters? It only makes sense for being confusing, which is the base state of Kubernetes.

"Our name is literally a complex joke about complexity" doesn't inspire confidence in a project that supposedly simplifies complexity.

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Well, for me the whole replace-letters-with-numbers thing is idiotic and requires some inside knowledge to understand which letters are replaced by all the numbers in words like a11y i19n k8s, etc.

On the bright side you can put whatever you want there. Personally I read k3s as "kerts", because why not. Similar to "thirds" but with the "t" from kubernetes.

I choose to read k3s as "soft boiled egg" because that makes as much sense as anything.

as the manager of the team that maintains it, this is now canon. We will use this exclusively in internal communications. thank you.

The three letters are k, 3, and s

The 3 is supposed to be short for three other letters. What are they?

Perhaps u,b,e

Kubernetes is often shortened to k8s, which is often pronounced "kates," which is further shortened to k3s.

Isn't it actually keigths which means it should be k5s?

Kubernetes reads like kubern-eight-es so k8s is the shorthand.

k3s is a pared down version of k8s, which is illustrated by the number 3 being chosen because it looks like an 8 sliced in half.

Never mind, I'm wrong:

https://docs.k3s.io/

"What's with the name?

We wanted an installation of Kubernetes that was half the size in terms of memory footprint. Kubernetes is a 10-letter word stylized as K8s. So something half as big as Kubernetes would be a 5-letter word stylized as K3s. There is no long form of K3s and no official pronunciation."

They took a chunk out of the left side of the "8", leaving "3". At least, that's how I've always interpreted it.

kubernetes -> k8s

k8s -> k3s

Double numeronym'd

Wouldn't k8s -> k1s then?

k1s -> k.1s

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