Weaveworks, the company that coined the term GitOps, will soon be gone. The company’s CEO Alexis Richardson wrote ua LinkedIn post at the beginning of this week that the company is shutting down.
According to Richardson, while the company was bringing in more than $10 million in revenue, sales growth was inconsistent. The company really needed a long-term investor and was in the process of being bought when the deal fell through.
This follows recent acquisition another continuous delivery (CD) company, Armory, whose intellectual property and technology is now owned by Harness.
As for what Weaveworks’ shutdown means for GitOps, Gopal Dommety, CEO of OpsMx, another CD company in the world, said that while Weaveworks was one of the originators of the idea, it’s now widely spread across the industry.
“GitOps is still the right answer for fast, automated, flexible and secure software delivery and operations,” he said.
According to Paul Delory, vice president of research at Gartner, the industry “is indebted to them for creating this category,” but “obviously it hasn’t led to commercial success.”
Delory attributes this to two main reasons. First, Flux, an open source CD solution for Kubernetes sponsored by Weaveworks, faced strong competition from another open source GitOps project, ArgoCD.
“I feel like there’s been a lot more interest lately in ArgoCD, which is easier to use… In terms of functionality, there’s a lot less daylight between the two products than there used to be,” he said.
Second, it’s possible that there simply isn’t a commercial market for GitOps, even though there’s a lot of hype around it. There are many reasons for this, such as because it is mostly limited for use with Kubernetes, there is a long setup process before GitOps can even go live, and there is confusion about who to sell GitOps products to: developers, IT teams, platform teams etc.
Overall, Delory says that the freely available market for open source GitOps tools makes it difficult to justify buying a commercial tool.
“Even if the IT organization is amenable to your sales pitch, you’re still facing a long, demanding sales process as you discover who in a particular IT organization has the desire and budget to sign a contract,” he said. He said. “That makes a steady flow of venture capital even more critical while you wait out these long sales cycles. But VC money is harder to come by right now. As Alexis alluded to in his blog post, Weaveworks was unable to raise enough capital to sustain itself until its technology and sales efforts came to fruition.”
Many people may also wonder what the shutdown means for the future of the Flux open source project, since Weaveworks was heavily involved in contributions.
Chris Aniszcyk, CTO of CNCF, which is currently home to the project, says many Flux maintainers have already been hired by other companies and will continue to work on the project.
“The CNCF will do its best to inform its member companies to get involved when these kinds of situations arise like we have had in the past,” he said. “CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) frequently reviews projects for correctness and in cases where a project is forked or has no maintainers, we work with our member community. Not too long ago, the Cortex project ran into issues where Grafana forked it and the maintainers were encouraged to focus on that project. CNCF called our members to see if people could help, and AWS and Red Hat stepped in.”
Richardson also said in his LinkedIn post that he is working directly with “several large organizations” to secure Flux’s future.
“The story doesn’t end here—our open source software is used everywhere,” Richardson said.