I was introduced to orchestrators when I started at Google in 2007. And my introduction was not to Borg but rather Ganeti. Ganeti was an internally developed cluster management system that operated on virtual machines. At the time, it was a basic wrapper around the open source version of Xen, and it provided a clustered solution that allowed us to provide virtual (instead of physical) machines to engineers.
We didn’t refer to Ganeti as an orchestrator, nor did we talk about it in the same vein as Borg. In hindsight, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to consider Ganeti a kind of orchestrator. Instead of operating on tasks (in the form of containers), it operated on virtual machines. Internally at Google, Ganeti served as a bridge from a world where some engineers could run their applications on physical machines to a world where every engineer ran their applications on Borg.
Several years later, I got a proper introduction to Borg when we rewrote the life cycle management system we built to manage Ganeti clusters and virtual machines. We ran it on Borg. Fast-forward to 2020. The COVID pandemic hit, and like everyone else, I found myself working from home. Suddenly, I had three-plus extra hours per day as a result of not having to commute to a Manhattan office. What to do?