What Is Weaveworks?
Weaveworks was a software company that specializes in tools for container management, microservices, and continuous delivery. It was founded in 2014 to provide innovative tools and processes for application development, especially in Kubernetes and cloud native environments.
Weaveworks developed an open source project called Flux, which has become a popular GitOps platform. In addition, it offered a suite of commercial products based on Flux, which support DevOps processes in a Kubernetes environment. These include networking, monitoring, and automation tools, aimed at simplifying the deployment and management of applications.
In February 2024, Weaveworks shut down due to business difficulties. Its commercial products are discontinued, and the future of the Flux project is uncertain.
The Flux Open Source Project
Flux is an open-source GitOps tool for Kubernetes, developed to automate and streamline the deployment and management of applications. It integrates closely with Git, using it as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application configuration. Flux ensures that the state defined in Git is consistently applied to the Kubernetes cluster, providing automated updates and rollbacks based on Git commits.
History of the Flux Project
Flux was initially developed by Weaveworks in 2017. The project quickly gained traction within the Kubernetes community due to its simplicity and effectiveness in managing application deployments. By leveraging Git as the central hub for operations, Flux addressed many of the challenges associated with traditional continuous deployment methods, such as configuration drift and manual intervention.
In 2019, Flux was accepted as a sandbox project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In November, 2022, it achieved Graduated status.
FluxCD
FluxCD, often referred to simply as Flux, is the core component of the Flux project that handles the continuous delivery aspect of GitOps. It automates the synchronization between the desired state stored in Git and the actual state of the Kubernetes cluster. This includes deploying applications, managing updates, and ensuring that any drift from the desired state is corrected.
FluxCD integrates with Helm and Kustomize, providing additional capabilities for managing complex Kubernetes configurations.
Get FluxCD from the official GitHub repo.
Flagger
Flagger is an extension of Flux that specializes in progressive delivery strategies for Kubernetes. It automates the promotion of canary deployments, A/B testing, and blue-green deployments, ensuring minimal disruption and high availability during application updates. Flagger continuously monitors the performance and health of new application versions, rolling them out incrementally and automatically rolling back if any issues are detected.
By integrating with popular metrics providers like Prometheus and Datadog, Flagger provides insights into application performance during deployments. This allows Flagger to make informed decisions about the progress of a deployment, enhancing reliability and reducing the risk of introducing faulty updates into production environments.
Get Flagger from the official GitHub repo.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Flagger Kubernetes
Weaveworks Commercial Products
Important note: Weaveworks shut down operations in February 2024 and the below products are no longer supported.
Weave Cloud
Weave Cloud is a SaaS platform that simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters. It integrates multiple Weaveworks tools into a cohesive interface that supports monitoring, automation, and development cycles. This platform encourages DevOps practices, helping teams accelerate development and operation tasks.
Weave GitOps
Weave GitOps is a commercial product built on top of the open source FluxCD project. It focuses on implementing GitOps practices, which use Git as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications. By leveraging Git for version control, Weave GitOps improves collaboration, increases efficiency, and reinforces security across the development lifecycle.
Weave Net
Weave Net is a networking tool for Docker containers. It manages the network of containers, enables them to communicate with each other, and handles their orchestration regardless of their deployment environment. This ensures seamless connectivity across containers, aiding in the creation of a unified application environment.
Weave Scope
Weave Scope automatically generates visual maps of application architectures, providing real-time insights into Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, and microservices. This visualization helps developers understand and manage their applications. By depicting the interactions and dependencies between components, it aids in diagnosing issues and optimizing performance.
Weaveworks Shuts Down: What’s Next?
In February 2024, Weaveworks announced it is ceasing operations. The unexpected announcement came through a LinkedIn post from CEO Alexis Richardson, marking the end of a journey that began in 2014.
Despite achieving substantial growth in 2023, Weaveworks faced uneven sales performance and a shrinking financial runway. The company had hoped for a merger or additional funding to secure its future, but these efforts ultimately failed. The competitive environment in the cloud native space, with rivals like CircleCI and Harness Labs attracting more funding, added to the challenges Weaveworks faced.
Over its lifetime, Weaveworks raised over $61 million, with the last funding round in 2020 amounting to $36 million. However, the economic downturn in 2022 and the subsequent lack of new investments made it increasingly difficult for the company to sustain its operations.
Weaveworks’ primary legacy is its contribution to the open source community, especially through the Flux project. In his announcement, Richardson emphasized he is making efforts to ensure Flux continues to be supported, but in the absence of its primary corporate sponsor, the project’s future is uncertain.
Transitioning to Argo After Weaveworks’ Closure
With the closure of Weaveworks, organizations relying on its tools should consider alternative solutions. While Flux is still available and widely used, many organizations are considering Argo, a suite of open-source tools designed for Kubernetes operations, which is also widely adopted and can replace all the functionality provided by Flux software.
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, similar to Flux. It allows users to define the desired state of applications and infrastructure in Git repositories and automatically synchronizes this state with the Kubernetes cluster. This ensures consistency and reliability in deployments.
Argo CD also supports automated syncing and health monitoring of applications, making it a suitable alternative for managing Kubernetes deployments.
Key features of Argo CD include:
- Declarative GitOps-based application deployment
- User-friendly UI for managing application deployment in Kubernetes clusters
- Automated sync with rollback capabilities
- Real-time application status monitoring
- Multi-cluster support
- Integration with Helm and Kustomize for configuration management
Learn more in our detailed guide to Argo CD.
Codefresh: An Argo-Based Alternative to FluxCD
The Codefresh platform, powered by Argo, combines the best of the open-source with an enterprise-grade runtime allowing you to fully tap the power of Argo Workflows, Events, CD, and Rollouts. It provides teams with a unified GitOps experience to build, test, deploy, and scale their applications.
You can use Codefresh for your platform engineering initiative either as a developer portal or as the machinery that takes care of everything that happens in the developer portal. Your choice depends on how far your organization has adopted Kubernetes and micro-services
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