[lobster_johnson]

I don't think that's true. If you believe the team that designed Kubernetes, Kubernetes is an attempt to improve on Borg.

Borg is an accumulation of a decade's work with containers at Google, and has been described by googlers as a rich but a little messy, having been designed incrementally over many years as needs have surfaced. Borg could never be open-sourced because it's so specific to Google; for example, it uses Google's own cgroups-based container tech, not Docker/OCI/etc. Omega, as I understand, was an effort to clean up Borg and modernizing it, but apparently it was never put into production; instead, some of the innovations ended up being backported to Borg [1].

More importantly, Kubernetes is based roughly on the same design as Borg: A declarative, consistent object store, with controllers, schedulers and other bits and pieces orchestrating changes to the store, mediated by a node-local controller (Borglet/Kubelet). A major difference between Borg and Kubernetes is that with Borg, the object store is exposed to clients, whereas Kubernetes hides it behind an API. Another difference is the structure of containers; Borg's "allocs" are coarser-grained than pods and Borg is less strict about where things go, which googlers have described as a shortcoming compared to Kubernetes' strict pod/container structure. Another difference, also seen as a shortcoming, is that Borg lacks Kubernetes' one-IP-per-pod system; all apps on Borg apparently share the host's network interface. Kubernetes also innovates on Borg in several ways; for example, Borg doesn't have labels [2].

Borg, from what I gather, scales much further than Kubernetes at this point, but it's really not related to the design. The design is fundamentally the same.

Yegge's criticisms are too handwavy ("overcomplicated") to counter, but I don't think Yegge knows what he's talking about here. As for "benefit": Not sure what you mean by this, but Kubernetes arguably comes with benefits — declarative ops, platform abstractions, container isolation — even if you're just running a single node. The notion that you only need Kubernetes if you have "Google-scale problems" is just nonsense.

PS. What's "Grab"?

[1] https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub44843 (I recommend reading this paper)

[2] https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kuber...

[pathseeker]

All of the things you described as improvements are more complexity and layers of indirection. Kubernetes may be an attempt to improve on Borg but adding on a bunch of features and plugin architectures to solve more use cases isn't necessarily an improvement.

[coredog64]

Is your assertion that k8s suffers from "second system syndrome" when compared to Borg?

[puzzle]

Kubernetes is actually the third system. In-between, there's Omega. Yegge must have never set up a GSLB or GFE service to appreciate the extra stuff that Kubernetes features.

[daxfohl]

Thanks for the detailed insight. I've been following k8s for a while now but never had a need, and Yegge's post put an end to it in my mind.

Grab is the company Yegge left google for. He always complained about google's inability to platformize, so random hunch is he instills this desire into Grab? But entirely random. I also don't know how influential he was inside google vs outside.