A company that arguably has more experience than any other company in deploying Linux containers at scale is Google. They have been running conatiners in their own datacenters for over a decade, contributing to the upstream Linux kernel in the areas of cgroups and namespaces. Using an internal system named Borg, Google deploys about 2 billion containers per week.
Deploying containers at that scale for that long tends to separate good container clustering design patterns from bad. Google generalized those good patterns into a container orchestrator they thought would be generally useful to others using the popular docker node-level container manager. In June 2014, Kubernetes was released.