Kubernetes Happy 10th Anniversary, Google Kubernetes Engine! 🎂

Kubernetes is an open-source system for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. It was originally developed by Google and released in 2014 to help simplify the process of running applications at a large scale.

Ish Sookun

Ish Sookun

2 min read

This year marks a major milestone – 10 years since Google first pioneered Kubernetes and GKE. A decade is a lifetime in technology, and in that time, GKE has helped shape how we build and deploy applications, adapting to the rise of microservices, DevOps, cloud-native AI, and edge computing. It's no surprise that Google is the top contributor to Kubernetes, with over one million contributions.

The Kubernetes Story

The story of GKE begins with Kubernetes (also known as K8s), an open-source system for managing containerized applications. Google originally developed and open-sourced Kubernetes in 2014, and it was later accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016. Google's expertise in this area is rooted in its own experience, as the company has been running its services like Gmail, YouTube, and Search on containers since the early 2000s. With billions of containers launched every week, Google has been its own best customer, and it's this decade of expertise that it shares through GKE.

A Decade of Innovation

After 10 months of alpha/beta development, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), then known as Google Container Engine, was launched on August 26, 2015, as the world's first fully managed Kubernetes service. Its early success was demonstrated by customers like Niantic, whose game Pokémon GO came to life on GKE.

GKE's evolution over the years has been driven by new features and increased capabilities:

  • 2017: GKE's node support was increased to 5,000, and the service was officially renamed from Google Container Engine to Google Kubernetes Engine.
  • 2018: GKE was made available across both Google Cloud and on-premise environments, offering a consistent platform for hybrid cloud deployments.
  • 2019: Google announced Anthos, which went multi-cloud, allowing customers to deploy and manage applications seamlessly across on-prem, public cloud, and multiple public clouds.
  • 2020: GKE's node support was scaled up to 15,000 nodes, enabling customers like Bayer Crop Science to handle massive workloads.
  • 2021: The launch of GKE Autopilot allowed developers to focus on their workloads by having Google manage the underlying infrastructure. Other features included GPU time-sharing and a blue-green upgrade mechanism for node pools.
  • 2022: GKE introduced support for Arm workloads with Tau T2A VMs, giving customers more cost-effective options.

Companies like Signify, formerly Philips Lighting, have used GKE as their foundation for a decade. They've scaled their infrastructure to support a fleet of over 153 million connected light points, absorbing an explosion in traffic while guaranteeing global reliability and performance. Today, Signify is leveraging GKE for new workloads like platform engineering and AI, exploring how GKE can help them transform technical signals into actionable diagnostics.

As GKE looks toward its next decade, it remains focused on helping businesses innovate faster, stay agile, and handle increasingly complex workloads, especially with the rise of AI-powered application development.