But there were/are many projects that offer those higher levels of abstraction on top of Docker; Deis, Flynn, Rancher, Fleet. I just don't think Kubernetes was

But there were/are many projects that offer those higher levels of abstraction on top of Docker; Deis, Flynn, Rancher, Fleet. I just don't think Kubernetes was that innovative in that regard. It won out because I mean of course it's a fantastic piece of software, that's a given, but the differentiating factor is Google's brand, not any particular technical novelty.