The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of Google.
From my understanding Google was one of the main contributors of the core features that have allowed containers on Linux. Specifically cgroups and LXC. And they have have been running containers for 10 years: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html
I'm not sure what you consider new, but it's definitely not super new to Google. I'm guessing your issue is that it's fairly new to being used in production across many companies, so security researchers are just starting to work on finding holes in it.
You are correct. cgroups v1 came from Google (mostly Paul Menage, if I recall my history). OP is in a sense slightly correct without realizing it that Borg predates cgroups themselves, but I'd wager Googlers would agree that they're pretty happily married at this point. Kubernetes just doubles down on what Borg learned in some ways (and discards others).
There's a distinction between containers the concept and Linux containers, of course, but yes. You've got it right.
This is true but containers for mortals have lagged behind. Especially in management tools. There was cloudvz. Then cgmanage that couldn't run au pid 1 which has security concerns of its own. It wasn't until systemd that a small team could stand up containers with any type of scale. Basically everything before, more or less, took a proprietary config management setup.
We stood up containers, on very large scale, in a PaaS, with a very small team, in 2012 (long before systemd, or Docker for that matter, became a major force).
This was made possible by the work done by Serge Hallyn, Stephane Graber, and others at Canonical. They delivered LXC and its integration with AppArmor, which in turn stood on top of the cgroups/namespaces work that Google contributed to the kernel. Ubuntu 12.04 was the release where the ability to securely run containers at scale became available to mere mortals.
From my understanding Google was one of the main contributors of the core features that have allowed containers on Linux. Specifically cgroups and LXC. And they have have been running containers for 10 years: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html
I'm not sure what you consider new, but it's definitely not super new to Google. I'm guessing your issue is that it's fairly new to being used in production across many companies, so security researchers are just starting to work on finding holes in it.