13 ms·

Weaveworks is shutting down

277 points by candiddevmike 3y ago

edoceo 3y ago
https://www.weave.works/ https://www.weave.works/ "Operate and Manage Kubernetes easily" / "GitOps Automation for Kubernetes Stacks"
- jes5199 3y ago
  thanks, I didn't recognize the name
- stackskipton 3y ago
  Probably most popular thing they built was FluxCD if you are confused where you have heard their name before. Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.
  - catherinecodes 3y ago
    Right. Flux was a handy little tool[1] that sync'd yaml manifests in git repos to live clusters. The concept was fascinating, and the tool was well done--small and efficient. Easy to learn. In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3]. The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated. 1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux https://github.com/fluxcd/flux 2: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-argo-cd-project/8678 https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-ar... 3: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2 https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2
    - yebyen 3y ago
      Sudden? We finally archived the repo at the end of 2022. https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/ https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/ I was hired to support Flux v1 two years after the events you described, in the beginning of 2021 to go on supporting Flux v1 until we could get everyone off the boat. (I worked at Weaveworks until last month, and I'm still a Flux maintainer! Keep the Flux talk in Present tense please! ;-)
      - catherinecodes 3y ago
        Yes, present tense is more appropriate. Best of luck to you on what's next.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    People like the weave network policy controller too.. at least in the earlier days of kubernetes, their cni was pretty popular for awhile.
    - kensey 3y ago
      That was my first recollection -- after CoreOS' Flannel, I think the next two (or at least two of the earliest) overlay networks available for Kubernetes were Weave Net and Calico (whose core maintainers started Tigera). Flannel is still around and under active development despite CoreOS being long gone; hopefully the tools Weave employees maintained can keep healthy communities going around them.
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      I think people got turned off from them when it came to light they had invented their own cryptography without doing any vetting that it was actually secure. At least, that’s why we moved away from it as quickly as possible with our reasoning being: “if someone is foolish enough to roll their own crypto, what else are they doing foolishly?”
      - bboreham 3y ago
        Despite having been the main maintainer of Weave Net for ~4 years, I have no idea what you are talking about. Weave Net used Google's NaCL library from day 1; later adding optional AES using the in-kernel implementation. https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/blob/master/site/concepts/encryption-implementation.md https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/blob/master/site/concept...
        withinboredom 3y ago
        The key exchange was/is totally custom without using anything standard, though it uses standard concepts (DH, though it does some non-standard things with it), which *might* be secure, but as far as I know, never actually put to the test.
    - thyrsus 3y ago
  - preisschild 3y ago
    I hope so too. Flux is the best Kubernetes Gitops toolkit IMO.
tnolet 3y ago
I was following them on and off as they started around the same time I started a company in similar space and we shared an investor. Similarly, Armory.io also got sold in what seems a fire sale ($7M after raising $200M). Goes to show how hard this space is.
- ushakov 3y ago
  There’s no money in DevTools. Businesses will see you as cost, not asset
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    It seems like you need to be doing at least part services play - product alone doesn’t cut it
    - api 3y ago
      A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either. Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's products... makes me think perpetually about how to fix this broken market by offering a way to pay for good tools and products without either proprietary lock-in or eternal rent (and centralization and all that entails). It's a very hard problem, and it's not really a technology problem. More of a biz/legal/economic problem.
      - dilyevsky 3y ago
        They’re cheap until the management realizes they just spent a year (so like $300k) educating their devops how cni works and they bounced to faang or some other startup so the project needs to be scrapped or restaffed again and started over. That’s where the services come in. Also yeah it’s well known ICs view saas as direct threat so everyone tries to skip them and go directly to KDM. That’s the reason nearly all enterprise software is pain to use
fxtentacle 3y ago
"a very promising M&A process with a larger company fell through at the 11th hour. And so we decided to shut down"
- JojoFatsani 3y ago
  Sad that some of the folks behind Weave didn't get a possibly life-changing exit.
  - makkes 3y ago
    The acquisition talked about in the original post wasn't much more than a life-saver for the company so in that regard you could call it life-changing in that many of the fine folks I worked with wouldn't have lost their job. It would have been very very far from what you usually call an exit, though. Nobody would have cashed out, except maybe some of the VCs and I'm not sure if they'd have called it a successful exit in terms of financial win.
mihaitodor 3y ago
Sometime last year, they had someone cold call me from the US to sell me stuff. I’m not sure where they got my number from, but I don’t think that’s a good strategy for trying to sell B2B solutions.
- RigelKentaurus 3y ago
  Agreed that it's not a good strategy, but unfortunately all too common amongst tech companies, especially startups.
- gedy 3y ago
  "LambdaTest" does that crap and will call even on weekends. I'm like gtfo of here man. Testing tools is like the last thing I want to talk about on weekend or on personal phone.
- javierluraschi 3y ago
  What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - coding123 3y ago
    The product is so good you found out about it from someone else and had to have it also... Kinda like docker or python or something. They actually had that when the first started.
    - runako 3y ago
      > What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you? >> Kinda like docker or python or something There's a lesson here in the difficulty of selling to developers.
      - RCitronsBroker 3y ago
mad_vill 3y ago
I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  > Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s. Not really, the space has simply grown faster than these companies could keep up with and were left behind. I can code up a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions in well under a week. With docker compose for local testing. That wasn't the case 5 years ago but it is now. Why would I want to be locked into Weave Works?
  - xenophonf 3y ago
    > a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions... [with] docker compose for local testing Please teach me, oh wise prince!
    - sytringy05 3y ago
      <7000 lines of cut / paste YAML later> “it’s that easy!”
      - xenophonf 3y ago
        I'd love to see 7K of YAML as every time I've asked, no one's been able to show me a fully worked, end-to-end example.
  - benjaminwootton 3y ago
    GitHub actions must have eaten most of the DevOps tooling market. It’s pretty good and it’s fine for the vast majority of pipelines.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Welp. Time to switch CNI on that k8s cluster... This is why whenever there is a choice between a grassroots open source project, and a corporate source project, I choose grassroots. When the corporation gets bored of the project (or just dies), the project dies too. Grassroots doesn't die as long as one person is still willing to merge PRs and make releases, and grassroots is much more likely to be forked and maintained in perpetuity. Community makes or breaks open source.
- menthe 3y ago
  Kinda surprised anyone would still using WeaveNet as a CNI.. it was a bit of a dumpster fire: https://blog.quentin-machu.fr/2020/08/07/our-breakup-with-weave-net/ https://blog.quentin-machu.fr/2020/08/07/our-breakup-with-we...
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    what is the idiomatic approach these days?
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      Lots of Cillium deployments lately but... Cisco just happened so, let's see how that goes.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      Cillium is probably the most rock solid option these days. They are still pumping out releases even though they had been recently sold to cisco
      - nightmonkey 3y ago
        Cilium wasn't sold to Cisco, Isovalent was. Cilium is F/OSS and a graduated CNCF project: https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=runtime--cloud-native-network--cilium https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=runtime--cloud-native-networ... Cheers.
      - deleted 3y ago
throwitaway222 3y ago
They were exciting when they first started, (8 years ago?) before k8s - they had some interesting networking capabilities including the ability to use zeroconf. A lot of Java clustering stuff builds off that which made them special in the age of Docker.
break_the_bank 3y ago
> The company was turning over double digit revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023. From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?
- kwerk 3y ago
  I think they meant to say "double digit revenue growth"
  - break_the_bank 3y ago
    That makes more sense! Thank you.
- gk1 3y ago
  Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years. I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this for a bit. Productivity is a hard sell for a company that is tech focused. Since a client basically can't measure the impact there is little external difference between a true solution and a fake solution. As a result even if you convince someone of the value a company that focuses on marketing to those paying the bills will win out against one that focused on building a better product. Security has fairly proscriptive compliance requirements (ie: SOC, etc.) which provide a benchmark against which to measure impact. Not impact on security but impact on meeting the compliance requirements.
deleted 3y ago
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hipadev23 3y ago
Weaveworks lays off 100% of staff. What was the headcount? ~50 people?
- yebyen 3y ago
  It was over 100 at the peak, I'm not sure how many of us were left last month. You're not far off.
  - hipadev23 3y ago
    Brutal. Well, best of luck to you all
fideloper 3y ago
Oh, just recently I noticed they had archived Ignite (within the last few months?), their very handy wrapper around Firecracker. What a shame!
- pstuart 3y ago
  That's how they originally caught my eye.
adamfeldman 3y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-management-platform-weaveworks-shuts-its-doors/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-man...
yencabulator 3y ago
> and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023 That is a curious KPI.
- samcat116 3y ago
  Its a pretty common KPI for B2B companies.
- mousetree 3y ago
  In the B2B SaaS world, it means they're signing up new customers (e.g. including some who might have well known logos).
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    Outside of bizdev brotalk, isn't that called "new clients"?
    - arccy 3y ago
      not just new clients, recognizable clients who are willing to be associated with you
- yebyen 3y ago
  It makes sense if you take in context that Flux, the most visible and well-known product of Weaveworks, is a donated CNCF open source project, and that companies like Microsoft, VMWare, AWS – can all engage with it directly, or by forking, or by building support for it directly into their own products. How do you place a value on Microsoft building Flux into Azure Arc? I know it isn't worth $0 but do they actually need a contract with anybody (at Flux or Weaveworks) in order to go on doing that - no. They don't need one.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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lijok 3y ago
Pouring one out tonight. Weaveworks did some amazing work. Grafanalib has saved me months of work in the past.
- slgeorge 3y ago
  Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.
  - preisschild 3y ago
    Thanks from me too. So far I've only used Flux in my homelab only, but I found it far better than ArgoCD, which I use at work.
slgeorge 3y ago
The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt. If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!
- aftbit 3y ago
  Just in time for cloud native to lose the spotlight in favor of on-prem and AI.
  - mfer 3y ago
    Cloud native does not mean public cloud. Google uses many of these patterns to run their own datacenters.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      And you should too since k8s, while an 800lb gorilla on the side of the implementer, gives your dev teams the cloud experience without having to build the APIs yourself. Which is pretty nice honestly, making infra self-service isn't on offer most places hosting on-prem.
  - slgeorge 3y ago
    FFS - talk about missing the point.
- dominis 3y ago
  Were there any salespeople on the team?
- eh_why_not 3y ago
  > The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. Question from someone with mostly back-end/services non-cloud dev skills: what exactly are Cloud Native skills?
propter_hoc 3y ago
I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-million-series-c/ https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a loss of about 1.5 million a month for three years until their runway "suddenly" ran out today. According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed. How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.
- api 3y ago
  Sometimes investors have no interest in anything but a large exit. So it's large exit or bust. Building something stable that grows at a reasonable pace is considered the worst outcome because it both consumes investors time/energy and delays closure of a fund. They're left holding shares that are illiquid. It's perverse of course but it can be something baked into the structure of how VCs and other funds work.
  - NavinF 3y ago
    > They're left holding shares that are illiquid More specifically, how much is a SAFE for 7% of a small business worth? If there are no liquidity events it will be impossible for investors to even get their money back let alone outperform SPX
- ushakov 3y ago
  We don't know all the details. Maybe they had high costs elsewhere or a market insight that made them re-think whether they want to be continuing to operate that business
- orsenthil 3y ago
orsenthil 3y ago
https://eksctl.io/ https://eksctl.io/ is a very useful tool developed and maintained by weaveworks. I hope it will continue to see development and maintenance despite this news. Sad to see a good startup folding up. All the best for your next adventure.
- kbumsik 3y ago
  eksctl should be fine. It is the official recommend tool by AWS and eksctl examples are everywhere in the AWS documentation. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-started-eksctl.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...
pmig 3y ago
Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else? But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.
- FourierEnvy 3y ago
  Better UI
  - mac-chaffee 3y ago
    I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me. ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA-2f5v-8r3f-8pww https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA... While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.
    - nullify88 3y ago
      Redis is also a requirement to run Argo CD. When comparing load on my home server, flux was much lighter. Flux also has a pretty cool terraform controller too. At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.
- alwyn 3y ago
  I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!
  - 3y ago
alexitosrv 3y ago
In LinkedIn I also read some of their key people wrote a post with this wording for the announcement: "I americium precise bittersweet to denote – officially – that Weaveworks volition beryllium closing its doors and shutting down commercialized operations." and I almost had an stroke trying to parse it...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sevagh 3y ago
Cortex was mentioned below. Weaveworks did a lot of work with scaling Prometheus with their tool Cortex [1] 1: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file
GeorgeRichard 3y ago
This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.
goalonetwo 3y ago
That whole CloudNative industry seems to be going downhill since the end of the free-money era. It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S. But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  I've worked with Kubernetes extensively since it became popular. Of the maybe hundred of companies I've worked with trying to onboard to Kubernetes, I don't think a single one really had a use case that justified the increased complexity. Kubernetes seems so great until you're suddenly drowning in YAML, un-upgraded clusters out of their support window, the need for an unbelievable amount of extra tooling (e.g. ArgoCD, Helm, CSI plugins, Operators), etc. Plenty of places made it work by paying for huge teams to manage it, but deploying software on regular old Linux servers is fine for most people with just a small amount of discipline. Use boring technology.
  - abhiyerra 3y ago
    You don't actually need most of that additional tech. Github Actions + Managed Kubernetes + Helm is solid. Everything else can be additive as needed. ArgoCD is largely useful for deploying to multi single tenant customer installations, but overkill if you have a single prod cluster for example.
cangeroo 3y ago
I think it's worth giving praise for their contributions to Flux. In my network, I'm the only one using ArgoCD. Supposedly they're equals, but it always made me curious to try Flux. Are there any statements about the future of Flux and other open source tools, and whether the remaining community has enough resources to maintain development, or if they will reduce their contributions to only fixing critical bugs?
- yebyen 3y ago
  Flux has a pinned discussion for nearly a month now, to be as upfront as possible, without being able to disclose anything that might be privileged information, but anticipating that the news would get out about our backer sooner or later (aiming to avoid 100 threads about the same topic) https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/ https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/ tl;dr: Flux is a graduated CNCF project and not going anywhere
- shurup 3y ago
  Can't tell for all their projects, but Flux seems to be safe. Stefan Prodan joined ControlPlane last month already and keeps developing Flux CD. Its latest release (v2.2.3) was delivered while working in the new company. He is also working on Enterprise Distribution for Flux CD (https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/distribution https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/distribution) there now.
debarshri 3y ago
We will never understand the journey of the founders here. In the journey you make mistakes, some of them fatal some of them not so fatal. But the bottomline is that weaveworks did built some awesome tools for the k8s ecosystem. They kind of propagated Gitops in k8s ecosystem. This is also a cautionary tale for the opensource centric businesses. I remember in my previous job, they would bundle and sell weavescope in the offering where in they would just get the latest version from quay or docker hub as is. I saw the same pattern with Grafana tools. Alot of "Make k8s simple" platforms bundle bunch of these VC funded devtools as offering. Loss of value sometime pains me.
ShamelessC 3y ago
Can someone please explain what this company actually did? I’m not a cloud person per se, but I find it strange that I’ve never heard of them given the overwhelming number of people here who are familiar.
- bboreham 3y ago
  Outside of the Containers / Cloud Native world, not much. But they were the 10th-biggest contributor to Kubernetes as of 2020, which for a ~50-person company is something. Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword. Weaveworks created and/or substantially funded these Open Source projects: - FluxCD - Cortex (scalable Prometheus) - Weave Net - Weave Scope (seen in 2023 KubeCon keynote) - EKSctl - Kubeadm - Kspan Plus many others.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    But what do you pay them money for? What problems do they solve for you?
    - bboreham 3y ago
      The first monetization strategy was a SaaS 'Weave Cloud' providing monitoring and GitOps tools. Then commercial versions of some OSS projects. Probably consultancy was the biggest revenue source overall.
      - ShamelessC 3y ago
        I’m more confused now ha. So they had a killer developer first culture but very little recognition otherwise? Sounds to me like they forgot what the purpose of having a company is.
    - fifticon 3y ago
      'Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword.'
johann8384 3y ago
So what's going to happen to the sock shop now?
- yebyen 3y ago
  LOL you'll have to get your socks somewhere else. The microservices demo is officially deprecated and archived: https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo I have seen others are still using it but not officially from anyone at Weaveworks
mathattack 3y ago
It’s a pretty awful note. “ The company was turning over double digit (>$10M) revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023.” Sounds like he was measuring the wrong things. “I could say that this should not have happened, but I know that we are not alone in this market.” Sounds like he’s justifying his failure by point at others in the market. Written like a Wall Street trader. Oh wait…
carlsborg 3y ago
Founder profile: started out as a rates trader at Goldman, and then founded RabbitMQ and sold it to VMware. King.
withinboredom 3y ago
I'm literally not surprised... https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment-841350796 https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment... And my comment: "Why would someone pay for something that is broken?" If you only prioritize work for paying customers, and don't do things to grow ... you'll eventually die from attrition.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  Wow, the reply from the CEO was really tone deaf. They clearly do not understand how to engage with the community.
runamok 3y ago
As I recalled eksctl is mostly maintained by weaveworks. https://eksctl.io/getting-started/ https://eksctl.io/getting-started/

277 points by candiddevmike 3y ago

https://www.weave.works/ https://www.weave.works/ "Operate and Manage Kubernetes easily" / "GitOps Automation for Kubernetes Stacks"

jes5199 3y ago
thanks, I didn't recognize the name
stackskipton 3y ago
Probably most popular thing they built was FluxCD if you are confused where you have heard their name before. Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.
- catherinecodes 3y ago
  Right. Flux was a handy little tool[1] that sync'd yaml manifests in git repos to live clusters. The concept was fascinating, and the tool was well done--small and efficient. Easy to learn. In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3]. The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated. 1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux https://github.com/fluxcd/flux 2: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-argo-cd-project/8678 https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-ar... 3: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2 https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2
  - yebyen 3y ago
    Sudden? We finally archived the repo at the end of 2022. https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/ https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/ I was hired to support Flux v1 two years after the events you described, in the beginning of 2021 to go on supporting Flux v1 until we could get everyone off the boat. (I worked at Weaveworks until last month, and I'm still a Flux maintainer! Keep the Flux talk in Present tense please! ;-)
    - catherinecodes 3y ago
      Yes, present tense is more appropriate. Best of luck to you on what's next.
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  People like the weave network policy controller too.. at least in the earlier days of kubernetes, their cni was pretty popular for awhile.
  - kensey 3y ago
    That was my first recollection -- after CoreOS' Flannel, I think the next two (or at least two of the earliest) overlay networks available for Kubernetes were Weave Net and Calico (whose core maintainers started Tigera). Flannel is still around and under active development despite CoreOS being long gone; hopefully the tools Weave employees maintained can keep healthy communities going around them.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I think people got turned off from them when it came to light they had invented their own cryptography without doing any vetting that it was actually secure. At least, that’s why we moved away from it as quickly as possible with our reasoning being: “if someone is foolish enough to roll their own crypto, what else are they doing foolishly?”
    - bboreham 3y ago
      Despite having been the main maintainer of Weave Net for ~4 years, I have no idea what you are talking about. Weave Net used Google's NaCL library from day 1; later adding optional AES using the in-kernel implementation. https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/blob/master/site/concepts/encryption-implementation.md https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/blob/master/site/concept...
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        The key exchange was/is totally custom without using anything standard, though it uses standard concepts (DH, though it does some non-standard things with it), which *might* be secure, but as far as I know, never actually put to the test.
  - thyrsus 3y ago
- preisschild 3y ago
  I hope so too. Flux is the best Kubernetes Gitops toolkit IMO.

tnolet 3y ago

I was following them on and off as they started around the same time I started a company in similar space and we shared an investor. Similarly, Armory.io also got sold in what seems a fire sale ($7M after raising $200M). Goes to show how hard this space is.

ushakov 3y ago
There’s no money in DevTools. Businesses will see you as cost, not asset
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  It seems like you need to be doing at least part services play - product alone doesn’t cut it
  - api 3y ago
    A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either. Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's products... makes me think perpetually about how to fix this broken market by offering a way to pay for good tools and products without either proprietary lock-in or eternal rent (and centralization and all that entails). It's a very hard problem, and it's not really a technology problem. More of a biz/legal/economic problem.
    - dilyevsky 3y ago
      They’re cheap until the management realizes they just spent a year (so like $300k) educating their devops how cni works and they bounced to faang or some other startup so the project needs to be scrapped or restaffed again and started over. That’s where the services come in. Also yeah it’s well known ICs view saas as direct threat so everyone tries to skip them and go directly to KDM. That’s the reason nearly all enterprise software is pain to use

fxtentacle 3y ago

"a very promising M&A process with a larger company fell through at the 11th hour. And so we decided to shut down"

JojoFatsani 3y ago
Sad that some of the folks behind Weave didn't get a possibly life-changing exit.
- makkes 3y ago
  The acquisition talked about in the original post wasn't much more than a life-saver for the company so in that regard you could call it life-changing in that many of the fine folks I worked with wouldn't have lost their job. It would have been very very far from what you usually call an exit, though. Nobody would have cashed out, except maybe some of the VCs and I'm not sure if they'd have called it a successful exit in terms of financial win.

mihaitodor 3y ago

Sometime last year, they had someone cold call me from the US to sell me stuff. I’m not sure where they got my number from, but I don’t think that’s a good strategy for trying to sell B2B solutions.

RigelKentaurus 3y ago
Agreed that it's not a good strategy, but unfortunately all too common amongst tech companies, especially startups.
gedy 3y ago
"LambdaTest" does that crap and will call even on weekends. I'm like gtfo of here man. Testing tools is like the last thing I want to talk about on weekend or on personal phone.
javierluraschi 3y ago
What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you?
- deleted 3y ago
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- coding123 3y ago
  The product is so good you found out about it from someone else and had to have it also... Kinda like docker or python or something. They actually had that when the first started.
  - runako 3y ago
    > What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you? >> Kinda like docker or python or something There's a lesson here in the difficulty of selling to developers.
    - RCitronsBroker 3y ago

mad_vill 3y ago

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.

marcinzm 3y ago
> Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s. Not really, the space has simply grown faster than these companies could keep up with and were left behind. I can code up a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions in well under a week. With docker compose for local testing. That wasn't the case 5 years ago but it is now. Why would I want to be locked into Weave Works?
- xenophonf 3y ago
  > a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions... [with] docker compose for local testing Please teach me, oh wise prince!
  - sytringy05 3y ago
    <7000 lines of cut / paste YAML later> “it’s that easy!”
    - xenophonf 3y ago
      I'd love to see 7K of YAML as every time I've asked, no one's been able to show me a fully worked, end-to-end example.
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  GitHub actions must have eaten most of the DevOps tooling market. It’s pretty good and it’s fine for the vast majority of pipelines.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Welp. Time to switch CNI on that k8s cluster... This is why whenever there is a choice between a grassroots open source project, and a corporate source project, I choose grassroots. When the corporation gets bored of the project (or just dies), the project dies too. Grassroots doesn't die as long as one person is still willing to merge PRs and make releases, and grassroots is much more likely to be forked and maintained in perpetuity. Community makes or breaks open source.

menthe 3y ago
Kinda surprised anyone would still using WeaveNet as a CNI.. it was a bit of a dumpster fire: https://blog.quentin-machu.fr/2020/08/07/our-breakup-with-weave-net/ https://blog.quentin-machu.fr/2020/08/07/our-breakup-with-we...
- whalesalad 3y ago
  what is the idiomatic approach these days?
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Lots of Cillium deployments lately but... Cisco just happened so, let's see how that goes.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Cillium is probably the most rock solid option these days. They are still pumping out releases even though they had been recently sold to cisco
    - nightmonkey 3y ago
      Cilium wasn't sold to Cisco, Isovalent was. Cilium is F/OSS and a graduated CNCF project: https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=runtime--cloud-native-network--cilium https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=runtime--cloud-native-networ... Cheers.
    - deleted 3y ago

throwitaway222 3y ago

They were exciting when they first started, (8 years ago?) before k8s - they had some interesting networking capabilities including the ability to use zeroconf. A lot of Java clustering stuff builds off that which made them special in the age of Docker.

break_the_bank 3y ago

> The company was turning over double digit revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023. From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?

kwerk 3y ago
I think they meant to say "double digit revenue growth"
- break_the_bank 3y ago
  That makes more sense! Thank you.
gk1 3y ago
Maybe it was edited later, but the post now says "(>$10M)". I interpret that as $10–19M. That's not great for a product that's been around for 9 years. I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I've been thinking about this for a bit. Productivity is a hard sell for a company that is tech focused. Since a client basically can't measure the impact there is little external difference between a true solution and a fake solution. As a result even if you convince someone of the value a company that focuses on marketing to those paying the bills will win out against one that focused on building a better product. Security has fairly proscriptive compliance requirements (ie: SOC, etc.) which provide a benchmark against which to measure impact. Not impact on security but impact on meeting the compliance requirements.

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hipadev23 3y ago

Weaveworks lays off 100% of staff. What was the headcount? ~50 people?

yebyen 3y ago
It was over 100 at the peak, I'm not sure how many of us were left last month. You're not far off.
- hipadev23 3y ago
  Brutal. Well, best of luck to you all

fideloper 3y ago

Oh, just recently I noticed they had archived Ignite (within the last few months?), their very handy wrapper around Firecracker. What a shame!

pstuart 3y ago
That's how they originally caught my eye.

adamfeldman 3y ago

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-management-platform-weaveworks-shuts-its-doors/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/05/cloud-native-container-man...

yencabulator 3y ago

> and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023 That is a curious KPI.

samcat116 3y ago
Its a pretty common KPI for B2B companies.
mousetree 3y ago
In the B2B SaaS world, it means they're signing up new customers (e.g. including some who might have well known logos).
- yencabulator 3y ago
  Outside of bizdev brotalk, isn't that called "new clients"?
  - arccy 3y ago
    not just new clients, recognizable clients who are willing to be associated with you
yebyen 3y ago
It makes sense if you take in context that Flux, the most visible and well-known product of Weaveworks, is a donated CNCF open source project, and that companies like Microsoft, VMWare, AWS – can all engage with it directly, or by forking, or by building support for it directly into their own products. How do you place a value on Microsoft building Flux into Azure Arc? I know it isn't worth $0 but do they actually need a contract with anybody (at Flux or Weaveworks) in order to go on doing that - no. They don't need one.

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lijok 3y ago

Pouring one out tonight. Weaveworks did some amazing work. Grafanalib has saved me months of work in the past.

slgeorge 3y ago
Thank-you - really appreciate this comment - acknowledging the work that great people did and the efforts they put in. I wish the outcome was different - but we really tried to do good things, and play well in the open source community.
- preisschild 3y ago
  Thanks from me too. So far I've only used Flux in my homelab only, but I found it far better than ArgoCD, which I use at work.

slgeorge 3y ago

The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt. If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!

aftbit 3y ago
Just in time for cloud native to lose the spotlight in favor of on-prem and AI.
- mfer 3y ago
  Cloud native does not mean public cloud. Google uses many of these patterns to run their own datacenters.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    And you should too since k8s, while an 800lb gorilla on the side of the implementer, gives your dev teams the cloud experience without having to build the APIs yourself. Which is pretty nice honestly, making infra self-service isn't on offer most places hosting on-prem.
- slgeorge 3y ago
  FFS - talk about missing the point.
dominis 3y ago
Were there any salespeople on the team?
eh_why_not 3y ago
> The shutdown means great people with Cloud Native skills are available now. Question from someone with mostly back-end/services non-cloud dev skills: what exactly are Cloud Native skills?

propter_hoc 3y ago

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees. On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-million-series-c/ https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-... In other words they somehow were running at a loss of about 1.5 million a month for three years until their runway "suddenly" ran out today. According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed. How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.

api 3y ago
Sometimes investors have no interest in anything but a large exit. So it's large exit or bust. Building something stable that grows at a reasonable pace is considered the worst outcome because it both consumes investors time/energy and delays closure of a fund. They're left holding shares that are illiquid. It's perverse of course but it can be something baked into the structure of how VCs and other funds work.
- NavinF 3y ago
  > They're left holding shares that are illiquid More specifically, how much is a SAFE for 7% of a small business worth? If there are no liquidity events it will be impossible for investors to even get their money back let alone outperform SPX
ushakov 3y ago
We don't know all the details. Maybe they had high costs elsewhere or a market insight that made them re-think whether they want to be continuing to operate that business
orsenthil 3y ago

orsenthil 3y ago

https://eksctl.io/ https://eksctl.io/ is a very useful tool developed and maintained by weaveworks. I hope it will continue to see development and maintenance despite this news. Sad to see a good startup folding up. All the best for your next adventure.

kbumsik 3y ago
eksctl should be fine. It is the official recommend tool by AWS and eksctl examples are everywhere in the AWS documentation. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-started-eksctl.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...

pmig 3y ago

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else? But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

FourierEnvy 3y ago
Better UI
- mac-chaffee 3y ago
  I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me. ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA-2f5v-8r3f-8pww https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA... While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.
  - nullify88 3y ago
    Redis is also a requirement to run Argo CD. When comparing load on my home server, flux was much lighter. Flux also has a pretty cool terraform controller too. At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.
alwyn 3y ago
I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!
- 3y ago

alexitosrv 3y ago

In LinkedIn I also read some of their key people wrote a post with this wording for the announcement: "I americium precise bittersweet to denote – officially – that Weaveworks volition beryllium closing its doors and shutting down commercialized operations." and I almost had an stroke trying to parse it...

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sevagh 3y ago

Cortex was mentioned below. Weaveworks did a lot of work with scaling Prometheus with their tool Cortex [1] 1: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file

GeorgeRichard 3y ago

This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.

goalonetwo 3y ago

That whole CloudNative industry seems to be going downhill since the end of the free-money era. It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S. But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.

spicyusername 3y ago
I've worked with Kubernetes extensively since it became popular. Of the maybe hundred of companies I've worked with trying to onboard to Kubernetes, I don't think a single one really had a use case that justified the increased complexity. Kubernetes seems so great until you're suddenly drowning in YAML, un-upgraded clusters out of their support window, the need for an unbelievable amount of extra tooling (e.g. ArgoCD, Helm, CSI plugins, Operators), etc. Plenty of places made it work by paying for huge teams to manage it, but deploying software on regular old Linux servers is fine for most people with just a small amount of discipline. Use boring technology.
- abhiyerra 3y ago
  You don't actually need most of that additional tech. Github Actions + Managed Kubernetes + Helm is solid. Everything else can be additive as needed. ArgoCD is largely useful for deploying to multi single tenant customer installations, but overkill if you have a single prod cluster for example.

cangeroo 3y ago

I think it's worth giving praise for their contributions to Flux. In my network, I'm the only one using ArgoCD. Supposedly they're equals, but it always made me curious to try Flux. Are there any statements about the future of Flux and other open source tools, and whether the remaining community has enough resources to maintain development, or if they will reduce their contributions to only fixing critical bugs?

yebyen 3y ago
Flux has a pinned discussion for nearly a month now, to be as upfront as possible, without being able to disclose anything that might be privileged information, but anticipating that the news would get out about our backer sooner or later (aiming to avoid 100 threads about the same topic) https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/ https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/ tl;dr: Flux is a graduated CNCF project and not going anywhere
shurup 3y ago
Can't tell for all their projects, but Flux seems to be safe. Stefan Prodan joined ControlPlane last month already and keeps developing Flux CD. Its latest release (v2.2.3) was delivered while working in the new company. He is also working on Enterprise Distribution for Flux CD (https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/distribution https://github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/distribution) there now.

debarshri 3y ago

We will never understand the journey of the founders here. In the journey you make mistakes, some of them fatal some of them not so fatal. But the bottomline is that weaveworks did built some awesome tools for the k8s ecosystem. They kind of propagated Gitops in k8s ecosystem. This is also a cautionary tale for the opensource centric businesses. I remember in my previous job, they would bundle and sell weavescope in the offering where in they would just get the latest version from quay or docker hub as is. I saw the same pattern with Grafana tools. Alot of "Make k8s simple" platforms bundle bunch of these VC funded devtools as offering. Loss of value sometime pains me.

ShamelessC 3y ago

Can someone please explain what this company actually did? I’m not a cloud person per se, but I find it strange that I’ve never heard of them given the overwhelming number of people here who are familiar.

bboreham 3y ago
Outside of the Containers / Cloud Native world, not much. But they were the 10th-biggest contributor to Kubernetes as of 2020, which for a ~50-person company is something. Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword. Weaveworks created and/or substantially funded these Open Source projects: - FluxCD - Cortex (scalable Prometheus) - Weave Net - Weave Scope (seen in 2023 KubeCon keynote) - EKSctl - Kubeadm - Kspan Plus many others.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  But what do you pay them money for? What problems do they solve for you?
  - bboreham 3y ago
    The first monetization strategy was a SaaS 'Weave Cloud' providing monitoring and GitOps tools. Then commercial versions of some OSS projects. Probably consultancy was the biggest revenue source overall.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      I’m more confused now ha. So they had a killer developer first culture but very little recognition otherwise? Sounds to me like they forgot what the purpose of having a company is.
  - fifticon 3y ago
    'Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword.'

johann8384 3y ago

So what's going to happen to the sock shop now?

yebyen 3y ago
LOL you'll have to get your socks somewhere else. The microservices demo is officially deprecated and archived: https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo I have seen others are still using it but not officially from anyone at Weaveworks

mathattack 3y ago

It’s a pretty awful note. “ The company was turning over double digit (>$10M) revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023.” Sounds like he was measuring the wrong things. “I could say that this should not have happened, but I know that we are not alone in this market.” Sounds like he’s justifying his failure by point at others in the market. Written like a Wall Street trader. Oh wait…

carlsborg 3y ago

Founder profile: started out as a rates trader at Goldman, and then founded RabbitMQ and sold it to VMware. King.

withinboredom 3y ago

I'm literally not surprised... https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment-841350796 https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment... And my comment: "Why would someone pay for something that is broken?" If you only prioritize work for paying customers, and don't do things to grow ... you'll eventually die from attrition.

spicyusername 3y ago
Wow, the reply from the CEO was really tone deaf. They clearly do not understand how to engage with the community.

runamok 3y ago

As I recalled eksctl is mostly maintained by weaveworks. https://eksctl.io/getting-started/ https://eksctl.io/getting-started/