State of GitOps now in Flux as Weaveworks shuts down

Weaveworks, the corporate that coined the phrase GitOps, will quickly be no extra. The corporate’s CEO Alexis Richardson wrote in a LinkedIn publish earlier this week that the corporate was shutting down. 

In response to Richardson, whereas the corporate was bringing in over $10 million in income, the gross sales progress wasn’t constant. The corporate actually wanted a long-term investor, and was within the strategy of being acquired when the deal fell by. 

This follows the latest acquisition of one other steady supply (CD) firm, Armory, whose mental property and expertise is now owned by Harness. 

When it comes to what Weaveworks shutting down means for GitOps, Gopal Dommety, CEO of OpsMx, one other CD firm within the house, mentioned that although Weaveworks was one of many originators of the thought, it has unfold broadly throughout the business at this level. 

“GitOps remains to be the correct reply for quick, automated, versatile, and safe software program supply and operations,” he mentioned. 

In response to Paul Delory, analysis vp at Gartner, the business is “indebted to them for creating this class,” however “clearly that didn’t translate to business success.”

Delory attributes this to 2 major causes. First, Flux, which is an open-source CD answer for Kubernetes that Weaveworks was sponsoring, was dealing with sturdy competitors from one other open-source GitOps venture, ArgoCD. 

“I really feel like there was way more curiosity in ArgoCD of late, which is easier to make use of … Performance-wise, there’s a lot much less daylight between the 2 merchandise than there was once,” he mentioned.

Second, it’s doable there’s simply not a business marketplace for GitOps, although there’s plenty of hype round this. There are lots of causes for this, comparable to that it’s primarily restricted to be used with Kubernetes, there’s a lengthy setup course of earlier than GitOps may even be up and working, and there’s additionally confusion about who to promote GitOps merchandise to: builders, IT groups, platforms groups, and so on. 

General, Delory says that the freely out there open-source market of GitOps instruments makes it laborious to justify shopping for a business device. 

“Even when an IT group is amenable to your gross sales pitch, you’re nonetheless a protracted, high-touch gross sales course of whereas you determine who in a specific IT group has the need and the price range to signal the contract,” he mentioned. “That makes a gentle stream of enterprise capital much more important, when you wait out these lengthy gross sales cycles. However VC cash is more durable to return by proper now. As Alexis alluded to in his weblog publish, Weaveworks couldn’t get its fingers on sufficient capital to maintain itself whereas its expertise and gross sales efforts got here to fruition.”

Many individuals may be questioning what the shutdown means for the way forward for the Flux open supply venture, since Weaveworks was closely concerned in contributions. 

Chris Aniszcyk, CTO of the CNCF, which is the present house for the venture, says that many Flux maintainers have already been employed by different corporations and can proceed work on the venture. 

“CNCF will do our greatest to inform our member corporations to pitch-in in terms of these conditions like we have now prior to now,” he mentioned. “The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) evaluations the well being of tasks usually and in instances the place a venture is forked or is missing maintainers, we work with our member neighborhood. Not so way back, the Cortex venture bumped into points the place Grafana forked it and maintainers have been moved to concentrate on that venture. CNCF made a name to our members to see if of us can assist and AWS and Purple Hat stepped in.”

Richardson additionally mentioned in his LinkedIn publish that he was working instantly with “a number of massive organizations” to make sure the way forward for Flux. 

“The story doesn’t finish right here – our open supply software program is used in all places,” Richardson mentioned.