(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 :-)