Brian Grant

Kubernetes Borg/Omega history topic 1: In Borg, Job Tasks were scheduled into Alloc instances, but almost everyone pinned groups of tasks into each instance. Often these were sidecars, such as for logging or caching.

It was clear that using such groups as the explicit primitive would be simpler. We called these "Scheduling Units". They were prototyped in Borg, but it was too hard to introduce new concepts. They became "SUnits" in Omega, and then Pods, as in a pod of peas or of whales, in K8s

We debated whether to embrace the containers-as-lightweight-VMs trend early in Kubernetes and just support one container per pod (initially called Tasks in the code), but I'm glad we didn't. One app per container unlocks the potential for more intelligent management.

Sadly it’s been difficult to remove the OS from the application :(