Weaveworks

» see weave.works as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Alexis Richardson and Matthias Radestock had already done this once. They built RabbitMQ and sold it to VMware in 2010, then started again in London in 2014 on the problem everyone had just acquired: containers were easy to start and very hard to operate. Their first product, Weave Net, gave Docker containers a network they could actually find each other on.

The thing Weaveworks is remembered for arrived in 2017 and it was a word. Richardson watched his own engineers running production by committing to a Git repository and letting a controller in the cluster reconcile reality against what was written there, and he called it GitOps. The controller was Flux. Weaveworks wrote it, opened the source and then donated the whole project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The company also wrote eksctl, the command line tool Amazon adopted for its own Kubernetes service.

On 5 February 2024 Richardson posted to LinkedIn: "I am very sad to announce, officially, that Weaveworks will be closing its doors and shutting down commercial operations." Revenue was over $10 million and new customer numbers had more than doubled the year before. The problem was the shape of that growth rather than its direction. Sales came in lumps, cash went up and down with them, and a promising sale of the company collapsed at the eleventh hour.

~ the dossier ~

~ what happens when the word is free ~

GitOps was an extraordinarily successful piece of naming. Within five years it was on conference tracks, job descriptions and competitors' landing pages, and it is now the ordinary way an enterprise describes deploying to Kubernetes. None of that value was collectable. Weaveworks never owned the term, never trademarked the practice, and had to sell its own paid tooling to buyers who had already taken the vocabulary for nothing.

The code went the same way, deliberately. Flux was in the CNCF, which meant the project had a governance structure and a maintainer base that did not depend on one company's payroll. When that payroll ended, GitLab and several others publicly committed engineers to Flux within weeks and the CNCF announced the new corporate support in March. The project never missed a release.

~ twelve days to a 404 ~

The marketing site did not change at all while the announcement was being read. The Archive has weave.works at 5 February 2024 22:12 UTC in full present tense, offering Weave GitOps Enterprise and Weave GitOps Assured, with a nav bar listing eleven open source projects and a line reading "Platform teams love the control, developers love the experience."

Twelve days later, at 17 February 07:34 UTC, the same host returns a Netlify page: "Site Not Found. Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on Netlify." It stayed that way. The domain has since been let go entirely, and a request to weave.works today lands on a Thai gambling registration page under a different name.

~ at this distance ~

Enterprise platform software sells to organizations with a cluster budget and a procurement process, and I have never sat on the buying end of either. What reached me is what reached everyone: the vocabulary. The word GitOps turns up in Turkish job postings and in internal documents at companies that have never heard of the firm that coined it. For a startup that is the best available outcome and the worst one, arriving together.

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