Google has been running everything in containers for more than decade. Internally, they use a system called Borg (http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html), the predecessor of Kubernetes, to scale and orchestrate containers across servers.
Lessons learned from Borg were used to build Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration system. It became popular very quickly when it was released in June 2014.
All of the best ideas from Borg were incorporated into Kubernetes. Many of Borg's developers now work on Kubernetes.
Kubernetes received thousands of stars at it's GitHub project (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes), and hundreds of supporters from the open source community and companies such as CoreOS, Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and so on.