10 things you didn't know about Kubernetes

1. Initially written in Java

Yeah, right? According to Kris' FOSDEM 2019 talk.

2. Code named "7"

As per the all-knowing Wikipedia entry:

The original codename for Kubernetes within Google was Project 7, a reference to the Star Trek ex-Borg character Seven of Nine.

I suppose one can't hide the Borg origins ;)

3. One of the fastest growing OSS projects

Kubernetes is one of the fastest growing OSS projects which has changed the industry quite a bit: beyond the bits, a number of concepts and terms that used to be mainly ops folks talk (rolling update deployment, load balancer, network policies, etc.) are now kinda standardized vocabulary that also developers throw around.

4. Lots of distributions to choose from

Although only some 6 years old, almost 70 certified distributions exist. It's kinda early days so still some half of the users (?) roll their own Kubernetes distro. But then, again, we used to roll our own Linux distros well into the 2000s, so there's that.

5. Throwing a Fedora into the ring

Red Hat bet very early on Kubernetes, did a total rewrite of OpenShift on top of Kubernetes. This investment paid off and in the course RH not only established OpenShift as an enterprise-grade Kubernetes distro but also upstreamed a number of (typically security-related) features such as RBAC or the pod security context.

6. From Raspberry Pi to Mainframe

My former Mesosphere colleague Elizabeth K. Joseph, now with IBM, talked about Wait, People Run Kubernetes on Mainframes? in the last pre-Covid KubeCon and Seth Kenlon of Red Hat gave us 5 reasons to run Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi homelab. So, what will it be for you?

7. Pronunciation is hard …

… and yes, kubectl is pronounced kubecuddle.

8. Inclusivity rulz!

While Kubernetes is up there with Linux in terms of OSS projects in terms of number of contributors or LOC, there's one thing that is pretty unique to Kubernetes: an extremely diverse and inclusive community. The only other community that comes to mind that is equally set up is the Rust community.

9. Lots and lots of upstream

You would not believe what you find when trawling the Kubernetes source code (and what else would you want to do, since we're not travelling anymore, LOL). Some examples:

• Websockets to exec into and log from pods.
• The venerable secure copy protocol scp as well as the good old tar to copy stuff from and to containers (immutable infra, much?).

10. First commit? First commit!

Thanks to the magic of time travel (erm, Git history) we can see what the first commit was:

First commit 

jbeda committed on 7 Jun 2014
0 parents commit 2c4b3a562ce34cddc3f8218a2c4d11c7310e6d56
Showing  with 47,501 additions and 0 deletions.

Joe was sure busy on that day :)

With that, thanks for stopping by and I'm wondering: what's your favorite thing about Kubernetes that few people know? Care to share?

The cover image uses a photo by Marcin Wichary - originally posted to Flickr, CC BY 2.0.