Learning Kubernetes® can be complex, and that’s before you get to the technology! Two questions that are often thought but rarely asked are “where did they come up with the name Kubernetes?” and “why all the ships?”
A less common question, but one that once asked can lead people to request change, is ‘why only 7 spokes?’ After all, 8 spokes would make the logo symmetrical both horizontally and vertically! Well to understand the answers to these questions, we have to understand Kubernetes history.
The first two questions actually have related answers. First let’s think about what container technology set out to solve - developer portability. Moving code from dev to QA to production in an easier way. And what is a container? Well Wikipedia defines containers as:
“A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping”
If you think about it, this is exactly what developers use containers for - holding their product (code) for shipping to production. Just like shipping containers revolutionized the logistics industry, cloud native containers were designed to revolutionize how developers package and ship code. Aha! Now the nautical theme to Kubernetes projects makes more sense!
So how about the name Kubernetes? Well, that actually comes from the ancient Greek word for helmsan. Κυβερνήτης means ‘pilot’, ‘governor’ or ‘helmsman’ - the person who steers a ship or boat. If we romanize this by rewriting it from the ancient Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet, we get kubernḗtēs. From there it’s a short jump to Kubernetes - your cloud native helmsman.
That explains why the Kubernetes logo is a ship wheel, but why only 7 spokes? For that, we need to dive a bit deeper. Kubernetes started as an internal project at Google back in 20131. Google’s internal container management system was known as Borg, and this new project would be an offshoot of it designed to bring its capabilities to everyone. This offshoot would be called Seven of Nine in homage to the former Borg drone who left and joined the Star Trek Voyager crew. The logo has 7 sides to this day in reference to this project name.
Why dive through all this history? Well, beyond just being interesting, it influenced us greatly when choosing a new icon to represent the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution. We decided to take this nautical theme and evolve it from sailing ships to space ships as NKP is built to handle all your cloud native workloads of today and tomorrow.
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