K8s is a numeronym — K, eight letters, s. Kubernetes itself is the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης, the helmsman of a ship. The seven-spoked logo is a Star Trek easter egg. The thing it names is the third generation of Google's internal scheduler.

A docker is a longshoreman — the worker at a port who loads and unloads shipping containers. The software took its name from the work; the work took its metaphor from the 1956 standardisation of physical shipping containers. The container ecosystem inherited the maritime vocabulary.