Brian Grant

"Kubernetes provides a first-class, native API object type in OpenShift Container Platform called Deployments. Deployments serve as a descendant of the OpenShift Container Platform-specific DeploymentConfig."

Yeah, Deployments originated in OpenShift and were ported to upstream, from my understanding.

The story I heard (and this was back in 2016ish, secondhand and in passing, so take however many grains of salt), was:

When the community decided to rework replica management, DeploymentConfig managing ReplicationControllers was proposed by the folks from Red Hat, but the community eventually went with a different proposal of Deployment managing a new resource called a ReplicaSet.

The key issue seems to be kubernetes/kubernetes#1743, which almost five years later reads as @smarterclayton proposing the adoption of DeploymentConfig as a result of existing discussion and @bgrant0607 taking off from there, paring it down and bending it into a different shape.

The OpenShift doc text makes it sound like Kubernetes Deployment is a lineal descendant of OpenShift DeploymentConfig.