ClusterHQ

» see clusterhq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Containers were designed to be disposable, which works beautifully until the thing inside one is a database. Early Docker had volumes, but a volume lived on the host, so moving a container to another machine meant leaving its data behind. Flocker was the answer to that: it moved the volume with the container, so a Postgres instance could be rescheduled onto a different box and still find its files. Version 0.1 was tagged on 12 August 2014, a few days after the first DockerCon, and through most of 2015 nobody had a better answer to the stateful container problem.

The company behind it was older than the brand by six years. Hybrid Logic Limited was incorporated in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2008 and spent its first years as HybridCluster, selling clustered hosting, with Luke Marsden as co-founder and chief technical officer. In June 2014 Mark Davis joined as chief executive, having previously co-founded Virsto Software and sold it to VMware, and that August the company started presenting itself as ClusterHQ, with the legal change of name filed at the end of December. There were two offices, one in Bristol and one in San Francisco, and a London phone number on the contact page that fooled a lot of people about where the engineering was.

The money arrived on schedule. A million dollars of seed in 2013, then a twelve million dollar Series A announced on 5 February 2015, led by Accel's London office with Canaan Partners alongside, for eighteen million in total. Twenty-two months later the board decided to stop.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what flocker actually did ~

The pitch demo never varied and it worked on people: kill the host a database is running on, then watch the container come back somewhere else with its data following behind it. Underneath, Flocker drove the storage layer, starting with ZFS and later speaking to a list of enterprise backends, and the company kept building outward from there. In July 2015 it put out dvol, which gave developers something close to version control over a local database volume, and by 2016 it was selling FlockerHub as a hosted place to keep and share those volumes.

What it could not produce was a customer list. The 2016 homepage named Swisscom and otherwise gestured at thousands of users and partners without a number, and the shutdown notice does the same. Flocker had 2,669 GitHub stars at the end, which measures interest rather than invoices. This was infrastructure for people whose job is other people's uptime, and that has never been my job. Everything I know about ClusterHQ happened in public.

~ the notice ~

It went up on the company blog on 22 December 2016 under the title "ClusterF***ed", written by Davis, and the operative sentence leaves nothing to interpret: for a confluence of reasons the board of directors, of which he was chairman, had decided it best to immediately shut down company operations. TechCrunch filed just before noon Pacific and SiliconANGLE had it out before ten that night, with the Hacker News thread at two hundred and forty-eight points in between.

What the record does not support is a story about a collapsed funding round. Asked directly whether the venture market was to blame, Davis declined the explanation while admitting the market was not what it had been at the Series A, and the reason he gave instead was timing: there was a big market to be built and it was off in the future, not the near future, with stateful containers running roughly two years behind containers generally. Docker had acquired Infinit earlier that month, which signaled that the data layer was going to arrive built in. The company was struck off the UK register on 12 September 2017.

~ what is still answering ~

The repository was never archived. Flocker sits on GitHub with its final commits dated 23 December 2016, both of them housekeeping to move the documentation somewhere that would outlive the company, and a README that still says the project is under active development. The documentation is indeed still there, on Read the Docs, nine years later. The marketing site went on advertising the FlockerHub beta into April 2017 with no tombstone anywhere on it, because the farewell lived at a single blog URL and nobody edited the front page. Today docs.clusterhq.com and flockerhub.com do not resolve at all, and clusterhq.com itself answers in Indonesian, selling slot machines.

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