Wercker

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

~ the goodbye ~

Micha Hernandez van Leuffen built the thing that became Wercker as a thesis project at the University of San Francisco, then turned it into a company in Amsterdam, by way of the Rockstart accelerator, in 2012. The Wikipedia infobox says 2011 and the article body says 2012, and nothing in the public record settles which one is meant. A seed round closed in January 2013, led by Shamrock Ventures with Greylock and Vitulum alongside.

What Wercker did was run your tests and your deploys on someone else's machines. You pushed a commit and a pipeline started, building and shipping whatever passed. The platform ran on LXC first and moved to Docker containers in late 2014, which was early: Docker itself was about eighteen months old. Being Docker-native was the entire differentiator in a market where the realistic alternatives were Travis CI or a Jenkins box you ran yourself.

Notion Capital led a 2.4 million dollar round in October 2014 and Inkef Capital led a 4.5 million dollar Series A in January 2016, by which point the company was seventeen employees across two offices. Total funding was reported as 7.5 million dollars, which does not quite add up against the rounds as listed. On 17 April 2017 Oracle said it had signed to buy the company.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five years of nothing ~

Oracle promised at the acquisition to keep the free community edition free. What happened instead was that development slowed and then stopped. The final release of the command-line tool is dated 5 April 2019, two years after the deal, and after that the service simply ran. Three more years went by with nobody shipping anything to it.

Hosted continuous integration is a category I have lived inside, the way anyone who has sat watching a build log has. The names I knew in those years were the ones everybody knew, and Wercker was not among them. It is the kind of product whose users nearly all arrived through a free tier, and whose death notice reached them through a GitHub issue.

~ the closing date ~

On 7 April 2022 Oracle announced that Wercker would be shut down on 31 October 2022, recommending Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps instead. The best-documented traces of that announcement are a tweet posted the same day and a GitHub issue in the Checkstyle repository, where a maintainer noticed their continuous integration was going away. Oracle's own notice is not findable now, which is why Wikipedia cites a bug report for the date.

The last thing the Internet Archive holds for wercker.com is a 301 from 22 September 2022, five weeks before the end. A lookup for the name today returns nothing.

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