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by hosh 3427 days ago
Google Kubernetes Engine still runs Kubernetes. I never looked at the Borg or Omega source code and had never been worked on a Google team. It is my understanding that there are some key insights developed from Borg and Omega that became part of the core concepts of Kubernetes that gives it an edge over other open-source orchestration systems. These include grouping containers into pods and using label selectors.
1 comments
alex-mohr 3427 days ago
Yes, many of Google's technical leads working on Kubernetes and Container Engine are former members of the Borg and Omega teams, so Kubernetes and our hosted version, Container Engine, both benefit from what we learned building those other systems. (I think our 5 most-senior engineers have ~40 years of container management systems experience between them now?)

And it's not just the rather-large core team directly on GKE and k8s, nor the related products like Container Registry [1], Container Builder [2], and Container-Optimized OS [3]. GKE and k8s benefit in other ways too: Google's internal kernel team helps debug customer issues when we trace them to the kernel, and people like Kees Cook are helping with the upstream Kernel Self-Protection Project [4] that make container technology more secure. In addition to that kernel work, Google also has rather-decent security teams and they work with us to improve security in other ways too.

Finally, re: toomuchtodo's question, "Why opt for Google if you're going to use containers in Kubernetes?" Because we hope you find that Container Engine is the best place to run Kubernetes -- and benefit from the other parts of Google Cloud Platform. If you ever find GKE is not that place, and you don't derive value from the rest of GCP, then exactly as toomuchtodo puts it: "You can even move to your own datacenter at some point (relatively) easily."

[1] https://cloud.google.com/container-registry/

[2] https://cloud.google.com/container-builder/docs/

[3] https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/

[4] https://www.linux.com/news/google-developer-kees-cook-detail...

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