It means "Helmsman" in ancient Greek. Similarly it's related to the word "Governor"

e.g: "kubernan" in ancient greek means to steer "kubernetes" is helmsman

"gubernare" means to steer or to govern in Latin "gubernator" is "governor" in Latin

Which then leads into the modern word "Gubernatorial", et al.

It's also a pun on Borg Cubes.

Um... in modern Greek too, not just ancient Greek :)

It is also related to the source of the word "cybernetics".

Correct, which is how it slants to the "Borg cube" pun. Cybernetics was the term chosen by Norbert Wiener in the book "Cybernetics," and he traced the word's origin to the greek "kubernetes;" it related to his first example of a cybernetic system, the self-correcting steam-controlled rudder on a ship [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_engine].

(Why the pun? Kubernetes was heavily inspired / guided by Google's internal scheduling tool, which was named Borg (http://blog.kubernetes.io/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kubern...).)

According to the IO 2014 talk about docker/kubernetes, it was chosen because it means something like pilot/helmsman.

"κυβερνήτης" (kubernetes) is Greek for "pilot" or "helmsman of ship".

Pretty sure it's due to it meaning in a literal sense, "Helmsman".

(disclosure: i work at Google and picked the name)

comments above are right -- we wanted to stick to the nautical theme that was emerging in containers and 'kubernetes' (or helmsmen is greek) seemed about right. the fact that the word has strong roots in modern control theory was nice also.

fun fact: we actually wanted to call it 'seven' after seven-of-nine (a more attractive borg) but for obvious reasons that didn't work out. :)

The GFS cell used back in 2004 for staging Borg binaries to production was /gfs/seven/, for the same reason :-)