Weaveworks is shutting down
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
At $10MM of revenue they can afford to keep a staff of 50 at a fully loaded cost per employee of $200,000. Yet, according to Linkedin they peaked at nearly 200 employees.
On top of this, they appear to have raised $36 million three years ago - https://www.weave.works/press/releases/weaveworks-raises-36-...
In other words they somehow were running at a loss of about 1.5 million a month for three years until their runway "suddenly" ran out today.
According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances of being a 200 person company until some greater fool bought them out, which appears to have failed.
How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.
Because that is what startups do. 80% of startups that are "successful" follow this pattern
You shoot for the moon, if you don't take massive risks, then you won't be rewarded.
It sounded like they were about to be bought out or aquihired, but it fell apart at the last moment (It's not uncommon)
> Far better to be a growing, profitable 50 person company than a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn.
because probably they looked at the pipeline and realised that if they wanted to deliver the features/customer growth they needed, they required 200 people to get there.
However, certainly at some point while they were burning through that $36 million it became evident that "moon" was no longer a viable destination. Why wouldn't everyone be aligned with making the adjustments needed to get back to default alive? Something is clearly better than nothing.
Now if it got to the stage where the CEO no longer wanted to operate at the reduced scale (and nobody else would take the role) or the product couldn't support itself at the reduced scale, then closure may have been the only option. It's just that the "moon or bust" mentality doesn't seem like something that should be set in stone for the life of the company.
In essence, if the startup is slowing down and perhaps not going anywhere, then the standard existing deal with founders where the founders can cash out only if they enable to VCs cash out at a profit (for example, if they manage to pull out all the stops to make a failing startup look attractive to some bigger fool) is exactly what VCs want, and in such a situation the founders have no leverage to extract a compromise that's worse for VCs.
What to you (and pretty much anyone else) looks like a business that just needs adjustments to reach profitability, to the VCs it's profile maintenance work for little relative benefit in the long-term. The chances of that company turning 10-20x profits in the next few years is basically zero and they just cut their losses (in their view).
I can easily imagine an alternate reality where VCs invest more thoughtfully based on more careful analysis of companies and they would have a much higher success rate and end up with even higher returns without creating unsustainable wealth inequality.
Unlikely. The problem of that view is that, when you're handling large uncertainty, you don't know which projects are the ones you should cancel and which ones to nurture. Past performance is a terrible indicator for lucky shots.
See the Talent-Luck simulation for instance.[1] You measure a population of projects affected affected by random events and profiting proportionally to talent, and the projects that end better off are the ones that chain multiple beneficial lucky strikes, with talent having little influence past a minimum level.
And the way to maximise gains over the whole population is setting a small flat subsidy for all, allowing everybody to explore their talent even after a wrong turn.
1 https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/so-youre-smart-but-your...
I don't think that's what VCs did. It looks more like they dumped millions of funding on a tiny number of hand-picked companies and used short term traction as the main metric and they equated profitability as anti-growth, failing to realize that, without demanding profits, growth could be produced artificially using money/advertising and that it doesn't mean that users actually want to use the product in the long run.
Profitability is how you know that users want to use a product; otherwise a company could just 'launder' investment money to their users somehow and of course nobody will refuse free surplus value and hence they will attract users... Until the investment money runs out and the surplus value stops being handed out to users.
Just think of Uber investors subsidizing rides as an example, as soon as that subsidy goes away, there's a good chance it will start declining. Uber is still unprofitable.
TIL a new term :-)
To you and I, this is patently obvious. This is not true however for VCs. In a lot of them, they'd prefer you fail entirely rather than limp along making 1x, 1.5x their investment. Zeroing out is preferable sometimes, weirdly.
It's not even weird. A "live" project requires effort, and that has opportunity cost.
I get preferring (10x or 0x) to (1.5x). I don’t get preferring a near-certainty of 0x to some recovery of their capital with a pivot to selling a smaller-but-sustainable business.
Is it something like they’re measured by LP’s (or someone?) on only non-zeroed investments?
But carry doesn't kick in until you start exiting - for a typical VC fund it takes many years. (I left a year ago, and we were 6 years in when I left; I retained a portion of my carry rights, but still won't know for a couple more years how much I get if I get anything at all)
And surviving on the management fees after the initial phace of placing the investment requires being lean and not putting effort into your low performers.
Meanwhile while a 1.5x is better than nothing, a company that sells at 1.5x is likely to be near 0x for you, because odds are high that to get there there'll be one or more funding events along the way to help that happen at/triggering terms that will dilute you massively. And odds of failure remains high.
And you need the 10x or 100x's, but the low ones means little - most successful funds pay back the entire initial investment from just a couple of investments, and make their return on a couple more. Quite often a single "fund returner" carries the entire fund.
A small recovery here and there at makes almost no difference.
So even a 1% chance of salvaging a "moonshot" is better - most cases where you get back less than 1x is going to be a rounding error of your funds overall performance.
A VC is not where to get capital of you want to pull back and pivot when things get tough.
(And yes, you should keep that in mind if taking a job at a VC backed company as well, and it's part of why stock/options should be on top of your normal salary, not compensating for a low one, unless you get founder-level stock amounts, and even then, think it through; I once almost torpedoed a VC deal as a founder because I demanded a commitment to raising salary levels after the next raise, and I don't regret it for a moment because life would have sucked without it)
Investors in these funds are diversified - they invest in VCs to take the high risk bets. They invest elsewhere for the steadier, lower risk returns.
That's not a major component of venture backed startups. For a company that has already been written off as a failure, often the board members that represent the VC would rather not have to stay involved and keep showing up for meetings -- they could be elsewhere; there's an opportunity cost.
If a VC had truly written off the company, and board meetings are not worth their time anymore, they can just resign their seat.
Tech companies want to disrupt and destroy everything in their market segment or die trying.
I wish there were more companies that would focus on stability, sustainability and longevity. But in my experience lack of rapid growth is a mark of failure for most companies.
Feels like a ZIRP truism that we may be seeing challenged in real time.
The next wave of successful tech companies might be the ones who explore new business models that better fit the new circumstances.
We really need to be casting more doubt on these assessments.
That means you need more velocity. Which means more people.
More sales, more presales engineers, more subsidies to undercut the competition.
You have to remember that VCs are rarely there to make sustainable businesses, they are there to make valuable assets that can be sold. Even the nomenclature reflects this, startups are in batches. Because out of a set of 100, you expect 90 to fail after two years.
Doesn't this sound like selection bias? If every other startup follows this shoot fornthe moon plan then yeah it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy
You never hear of the 95% of unsuccessful startups
But everyone is following the runbook as if they were the successful 1% (not even the successful 5%, they all act as if they are the top 1%)
I think it's because that's what makes sense from the VC's perspective. To the VC each startup is a lottery ticket with a low probability of an outsized success and a high probability of failure.
You can burn the startup as hard as you can, because the cost is primarily borne by the startup and the founders. If the startup fails it doesn't matter much to the investor because the portfolio is constructed to be resilient to a large number of failures.
What the OP is getting at is: if you look at this from the startup/founder's perspective isn't that kind of a huge waste? And yeah, it is. But I think the idea is that startups and founders aren't pets, they're cattle.
I’ve never seen a team of 100 developers do anything quickly. Motivated teams of 10-20 can do amazing things.
Some scale is needed, but 100 people working for 1 year cannot accomplish that of 10 people for 10 years.
The irony is they could have kept headcount low, and used the $$ millions to do amazing things for years. Instead it is torched for bragging rights.
The biggest issue is that product and project management isn't taught well. There isn't a wealth of easy to understand literature. The stuff thats available tends to be LLM level waffle.
you can hire consultants, but they also tend to speak in business vague, without offering specific advice.
Sadly, what you need are experienced PMs, lead engineers and business types. They are hard to find, and tend to come late to startups.
It is possible to grow a company from 25 devs to 100 and keep velocity. But it requires planning, clear communication and clear process to make sure that people are not spinlocking or re-inventing the wheel. I know its possible, because I've been at a place that's done it.
Perhaps the buyer didn’t want to be on the hook for the massive losses they were racking up?
What % of startups that follow this pattern are successful, though, I wonder?
Do you know who was about to acquire them?
I've worked at several startups who never cut costs, meanwhile they're burning through cash faster than an incinerator at the local trash company. I had one company CEO who remodeled our entire offices, got sky boxes for all the local sports teams (there were four of those) and made a point to tell all the devs they're the highest paid startup devs in the city.
I found out later, our CEO also had a pissing contest with another startup CEO on the same floor of the building we were in. Both companies had over $200M in VC money, and both were trying to outdo each other with the lavish lifestyles they were living on the investors money.
The other company put on a massive "release" party to announce their internet software to the local tech new media. Apparently they blew close 10 $2M on it. Limo's for all the employees to the five star hotel ball room, a red carpet VIP entrance for all the employees like you see on those awards show, some 70's rock band played, and it was open bar all night and they reserved an entire floor of rooms in the hotel where the bash was thrown. Two of the devs told me afterwards, "Dude, totally not my scene, and none of our team were cool with this at all."
Less than two months later, both companies ran out of money, quietly shut their doors and closed down.
At a bar across the street, we had a group of devs from both companies sitting around lamenting what went wrong, where we were going to next, and reminisce about both companies.
We all reached the same conclusion:
>> According to the CEO's linkedin post, they were basically trying to keep up appearances
What are those? Is it like a video game sky box, something you somehow attach to your ceiling to create a “sky” environment?
1) As a CEO, I want headcount. Being the CEO of a 200-person operation sets me up for better jobs than a 50-person one. Being in high-profile organizations if good too (and when they fail, I can switch jobs). Same for VPs and managers.
2) As a CEO, I want bonuses. Those come from growth. Zero bonus is the same whether the company lives or stagnates.
3) Rationally, in winner-takes-all markets, a lot of this depends on early losses and overspending. If you and I are building eBay, and I get there for $10M and you for $100M in 10% less time running massive losses, you win. A lot of tech is winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most.
.... and so on.
Except for retirement account holders whose money is being spent, it's almost certainly better to be a cash-burning Potemkin unicorn than a growing, profitable 50 person company.
That's probably pretty brutal summary of most of past two decades I guess?
Also, had it been bootstrapped, might have a different outcome, could scale down, pivot while staying a small profitable shop.
Longer. This has been the main playbook even going back to the '00s!
Also commercial real estate fits your criteria almost perfectly.
Small slow growing businesses tend not to actually need capital very often, so there isn't exactly a huge market for investing in them.
On the other hand, you get a lot of businesses whose owners are getting old / sick of the business. They need somebody to buy them out and install a new management structure.
There are a bunch of funds who do things like that. Look for "Private Equity" as a more broad category rather than just "Venture Capital".
It's perverse of course but it can be something baked into the structure of how VCs and other funds work.
More specifically, how much is a SAFE for 7% of a small business worth? If there are no liquidity events it will be impossible for investors to even get their money back let alone outperform SPX
It's like playing Super Mario: one life left? Die sooner to restart again.
There will be a next startup soon, and saving this one does not worth effort. Besides that, the CEO has probably got his cut already as salary. This cow is done, bring in the next one.
Probably get more money on the next startup as a result. WeWork is an excellent example. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/business/dealbook/adam-ne...
In a lot of cases, it seems like the real incentive is "pretend to have a really desirable product, make demo after demo to draw in investment, party as much as you can while pretending to make something, lateral to the next company while claiming external market conditions." Live the Wolf of Wall St. life while the Titanic sinks.
Still think the main Pokemon advancement for companies is mostly -> Bankemon -> Casinomon
Thank you for putting these two words together, they're perfect.
Where in the linkedin post does the CEO state that?
My understanding is that they reduced headcount greatly over the last couple of years and were well below a 100 people. The source of this was a then current employee that my company interviewed in November.
Once you take big investment it comes with the expectation you will get to 500m$ at least. VCs don't want to 2x their money. They want a small chance of 20x.
For larger businesses would it be possible without adopting an extreme socialist (or even communist) approach? If so, how would you balance this with the interests of investors/owners (i.e. people that aren't involved in the operation of the business)? Would the businesses be more or less sustainable on average? Does the very existence of outside investors necessitate categorising wages and salaries as a cost?
Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.
In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3].
The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated.
1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux 2: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-ar... 3: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2
https://fluxcd.io/flux/migration/timetable/
I was hired to support Flux v1 two years after the events you described, in the beginning of 2021 to go on supporting Flux v1 until we could get everyone off the boat.
(I worked at Weaveworks until last month, and I'm still a Flux maintainer! Keep the Flux talk in Present tense please! ;-)
https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/blob/master/site/concept...
Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.
I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.
When you are running a consultancy you are in the business of marking up developer hours: find a client to sign a contract for $150 / hour and hire a consultant who will do the job for $100k/year salary. Then convince them to work as many hours as possible for their fixed salary, plus the carrot of a bonus payout every once in a while if everyone bills lots of hours.
Having that developer spend any time working on the company's product causes all sort of problems. The most immediate is the loss of revenue. But also now this employee might see working on the product as cutting into their bonus since they are billing less hours. Everyone wants some of the upside if the side product generates revenue but how do you split it between people who worked directly on the product and people who worked on paying client jobs to generate the revenue so the others could work on the product? It ends up causing a rift.
The other thing I've seen while working at small and even medium sized consultancies is that they end up dependent on one large customer who calls all the shots and takes up all the available time, or all "extra" time not being billed is used working on sales for the next contract. Either way there doesn't end up being much capacity to work on cool tooling.
The only time I've seen this work (and I have seen it work multiple times) is with managed hosting.
So if you are an expert at developing web applications or solutions using <product X> you can offer a managed hosting solution to your clients where you host the web app or the <product X> solution. Not all of them will take you up on it, but some will. Those that do will pay you a monthly fee. This isn't free (you now have to carry a pager) but is recurring.
Building your own SaaS/other unrelated product? That's a rock I've seen several consulting ships crash into (to pick a metaphor). Here's one that some of my friends tried to build in the late 2000s that I wrote about: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/506
There are still a few people in the trough of disillusionment yelling about how a $5/month VPS is all you'll ever need, or a $50/month bare metal colocated server is all you'll ever need. But for the most part the people who benefit from cloud services & containerization will use it when they need to, avoid it when they don't. It'll continue to be a productive tool when used properly, with vendors supporting mature products using it that solve people's problems.
It reduces what "most orgs" are (as if 80% of businesses are the same, or solve the same problems, or have the same challenges, or use the same approaches, or have the same customers, have the same staff or expertise, budgets, timelines, etc, etc, etc.). Clearly there is no such thing as "most orgs", as there are many different kinds of businesses and how they approach solving problems varies from business to business. Their use of technology to solve problems also can't be easily reduced; the way the business chooses to solve problems doesn't necessarily dictate what technology they should use.
It correlates the need for complexity with whether an organization is in some 20% minority of organizations, as if only a minority of orgs should or shouldn't use a complex tool.
It reduces a given tool down to "complex or not", as if complexity is the only consideration of whether to use a tool or not. There may be many different reasons to use a tool regardless of whether it's complex.
It assumes that a given tool has some inherent complexity that isn't comparable to other tools. Other tools might have less inherent complexity, but their lack of complexity may then create new problems that have to be solved, which just moves the complexity from the tool to a bunch of other places.
Overall, it correlates the way you solve problems, with how complex a tool is, with whether your organization is of one of two large generic groups. This is such a sweeping conclusion that it would be impossible to prove or demonstrate.
Based on your comment about them "using Fargate" instead, I'm assuming what you're actually saying is you think people should be using a managed product which uses containerization [and possibly k8s], rather than managing a complex technology themselves. I agree. But that doesn't mean we can generalize about who should be using what and when.
Also, no need to assume. I specifically said "use something managed".
Which might be in line with what you said about
> 80% of orgs don't have the scale, core competencies or justifiable need to be managing container clusters themselves.
But also, would at least have some potential to be solved and much more cost effectively, or maybe at least grown past, if they would just spend some energy on deploying Kubernetes internally; even if we can't or won't afford an entire team dedicated to doing only that, (and even if we commit to using only managed services for production anywhere and everywhere.)
In my experience the way some places reflexively avoid it like it's a trap to be stayed out of, winds up being a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy "we're not doing Kubernetes" - I empathize with the person who you triggered, even if now we're up to two walls of text from just a simple comment, I feel triggered too.
However some balance is needed. Orgs may want to do exploration since it may not be obvious where competitive advantage can come from, or like you say perhaps hybrid makes sense, using it only in non prod.
However I am wary of the capacity of skills vendors to take advantage when you come to depend on them, even when their intentions are good and all ideals aligned. Being able to deliver the limited Kubernetes experience for yourself in low-stakes contexts, where you can depend on it because you know how it works, well enough to administer in a pinch, but availing that also in a pinch you're not the bottleneck to solve a problem, because you use the managed broker in all the places where it matters, feels like a sweet spot to me.
I don't want to pay money to a broker every time I spin up a new experiment for the duration of the experiment =/= I don't want to perform experiments.
That's where I see the disconnect that "Leadership" may fail to understand. You can provide a service at low marginal cost to take some of the load off your people, and that might also have the effect of stopping any experiments that fall beneath a certain threshold as "not worth the cost" - all because we settled on getting something for cheap that should have been free.
Then again, dodging all those diversions might have been a part of the strategy...
Not really, the space has simply grown faster than these companies could keep up with and were left behind.
I can code up a CICD pipeline that does per-PR namespace isolated deploys of an app stack on EKS using Github actions in well under a week. With docker compose for local testing. That wasn't the case 5 years ago but it is now. Why would I want to be locked into Weave Works?
It and (GitLab CI) ate Jenkins
Please teach me, oh wise prince!
As of a year ago this is possible in a fully declarative way with Flux 2, but there’s a lot more moving parts and security footguns - and the idea that the maintenance of this project has lost one of its primary sponsors is worrying at best.
https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/831
https://blog.kluctl.io/introducing-the-template-controller-a...
Our devs/SRE put up apps and clusters in minutes (aside from the terrible alb/ecs/eks/etc deployment times).
That'd give you a repeatable deployment for disaster recovery without having the toil of writing that part of it. Having to click through every checkbox in the console and iam perms and blahblah under fire is rough.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/console-recorder-fo...
We looked at weaveworks and its competitor both as a product and an investment (mid 6 figure usage). Our big issue was that we had a lot of smaller teams doing different things and not one or two featured items raking in the majority of our revenue.
These solutions work if you have a bunch of snowflake workloads by design (or bad design).
That's a really interesting characterization of WGE, and I can't say I disagree much (my personal opinion as an ex-Wyvern/OSS Engineer DX @ weaveworks)
Kubernetes is just boring now. It's stable, the people who need to know it probably know it. I started working and contributing to k8s in 2015 back in version 1.1. 7 years of the same technology. I haven't even used it in 2-3 years (1.18) and I know I can hop over to it and do exactly what I used to do with some CRD flare.
All of the contributors should be proud of what they've built, that's the goal in the end, stability to where it's an afterthought.
The only way out is to either gut your way through it till you grow enough to be able to push back without risking your existence; detect that things are going that way early and fire them as a customer before it ever gets to that point... or keep burning out staff till you can't find fresh faces, then close up shop.
Back in the day there was a smaller consultancy with awesome developers called LShift (mentioned here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_London_Tech_City). They worked out that an open source messaging thing would be useful, and created RabbitMQ (there were details about who, how it was funded internally, etc). That got sold to VMWare, and a bunch of people went with it, but LShift went on as before, happy, but always looking for another Rabbit. Didn't find one, was aquihired in the end.
Meanwhile, some of the Rabbit people formed Weave, looking for the killer business around the early container ecosystem (https://www.weave.works/oss/net/ was interesting, eksctl, flux, CNCF, lots of good things). But I guess they took a bite of the VC apple and sustainable technical contributions was no longer the goal.
I've huge respect for everyone I knew from Weave. Great people all. Best wishes and I know you'll land on your feet.
Are there opportunities for VC funded with growth expectations in this kind of business?
I think this is the model most of the big shops like IBM and Oracle also use. Infrastructure tooling is not usually a core competency for most companies, and they want others to do it for them.
The issue here is the lack of appeal for investors, leading to a tenfold decrease in new cos. However, the startups that do launch are likely to be more sustainable
Was? What's more popular than that today?
I have worked in multiple orgs that standardized on Kubernetes as end users. Those numbers are coming from my real life experience. If we include all costs it is actually probably way higher than 200k per cluster.
As someone who works for a company that sells various k8s versions of products and services, we're only now seeing some of our bigger customers really starting to use k8s more exclusively. So at least my experience is the opposite of yours, it seems that at least in some industries k8s is only now seeing significant adoption.
Goes to show how hard this space is.
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/gtlb
More info here:
https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2021-10-13-gitlab-an...
https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/
MongoDB, Snyk and Auth0 might beg to differ. (I work for an Auth0 competitor.)
> Businesses will see you as cost, not asset
Isn't that true of any tool? How are devtools different (from a business perspective)?
Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's products... makes me think perpetually about how to fix this broken market by offering a way to pay for good tools and products without either proprietary lock-in or eternal rent (and centralization and all that entails). It's a very hard problem, and it's not really a technology problem. More of a biz/legal/economic problem.
Example: "John is a cheap bastard. He never spends any money or buys the cheapest options".
Or if you want to combine all of the above: perfectly functional but artificially gated features.
If you could pay for a service that GUARANTEES the vendor does not allow their sales people anywhere near your details, that might change things.
I think the aversion to lock-in or recurring expense is stronger than merely an unwillingness to spend money.
No business wants to use a software product that is not being actively maintained, so even if you get sold a perpetual license to "own" a version of the product, you will keep going back to the same vendor to get new versions. So, you are actually still paying a periodic fee, just maybe with capex instead of opex. And if the vendor goes out of business, you'll have to start moving to a new product, so you didn't really "own" the software any more than if you had been paying an explicit rent on it.
Now, SaaS where you are sending all your data to the company's servers is probably one step too far, for various other reasons. But perpetual licenses are generally a bigger scam than periodic ones for business software.
People across all teams: marketing, product, engineering, dev-rel, consulting / CRE, customer success and business operations
Across the States, UK/Europe and Egypt.
If you can help these fantastic people find new roles - please get in touch!
Question from someone with mostly back-end/services non-cloud dev skills: what exactly are Cloud Native skills?
But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.
Not that you need to "buy" anything - but IIRC the only offering that Flux had was a SaaS feature that sort of gave you an UI.
If the UI was what you were looking for, you'd go with ArgoCD.
Finally, I think they messed up the Flux 1 -> 2 migration as they weren't compatible with each other. For my own use case, instead of migrating to 2 I have just switched to ArgoCD.
Feature-wise, ArgoCD always seemed one step ahead, and more people seemed to prefer ArgoCD over Flux - and this can probably be seen also by the fact that they had an "ArgoCon" but there was never a "FluxCon".
Don't get me wrong, I love(d) Flux and I always rooted for that - but over time I switched to ArgoCD and never looked back. In the end, they were two products doing pretty much the same thing, under the CNCF umbrella.
Thanks!
ArgoCD also has its own auth system and permissions. You give ArgoCD cluster-admin rights, then it uses impersonation to pretend like it has lower permissions. One little bug there and you can trick ArgoCD into escalating your permissions, which happens a lot: https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/security/advisories/GHSA...
While not officially supported, you can technically deploy Flux with limited permissions, but ArgoCD's dependence on impersonation means it cannot run with lower permissions.
At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.
It is surprising that it took that long. Very few companies really have the need to run at scale distributed systems on K8S.
But as soon as you get into that world, you suddenly need an operational team of 15 people to manage the 50000 moving pieces in that ecosystem.
Of the maybe hundred of companies I've worked with trying to onboard to Kubernetes, I don't think a single one really had a use case that justified the increased complexity.
Kubernetes seems so great until you're suddenly drowning in YAML, un-upgraded clusters out of their support window, the need for an unbelievable amount of extra tooling (e.g. ArgoCD, Helm, CSI plugins, Operators), etc.
Plenty of places made it work by paying for huge teams to manage it, but deploying software on regular old Linux servers is fine for most people with just a small amount of discipline.
Use boring technology.
https://github.com/weaveworks/weave/issues/3868#issuecomment...
And my comment: "Why would someone pay for something that is broken?"
If you only prioritize work for paying customers, and don't do things to grow ... you'll eventually die from attrition.
They clearly do not understand how to engage with the community.
This is why whenever there is a choice between a grassroots open source project, and a corporate source project, I choose grassroots. When the corporation gets bored of the project (or just dies), the project dies too. Grassroots doesn't die as long as one person is still willing to merge PRs and make releases, and grassroots is much more likely to be forked and maintained in perpetuity. Community makes or breaks open source.
https://github.com/rajch/weave/tree/reweave
If you use Weave net still, definitely follow his work and consider learning to build the image, so you can keep it ahead of CVE scanners. (You are using a CVE scanner in your clusters, right?)
Sad to see a good startup folding up. All the best for your next adventure.
It is the official recommend tool by AWS and eksctl examples are everywhere in the AWS documentation.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/getting-sta...
In my network, I'm the only one using ArgoCD. Supposedly they're equals, but it always made me curious to try Flux.
Are there any statements about the future of Flux and other open source tools, and whether the remaining community has enough resources to maintain development, or if they will reduce their contributions to only fixing critical bugs?
https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2/discussions/
tl;dr: Flux is a graduated CNCF project and not going anywhere
This is also a cautionary tale for the opensource centric businesses. I remember in my previous job, they would bundle and sell weavescope in the offering where in they would just get the latest version from quay or docker hub as is. I saw the same pattern with Grafana tools. Alot of "Make k8s simple" platforms bundle bunch of these VC funded devtools as offering. Loss of value sometime pains me.
From the LinkedIn post. Does this mean $100 MRR / ARR ?
I consulted a similar company in their space ~5 years ago. What I found was that the way to make money in K8s automation/monitoring is to position it as a security solution. That's what Snyk did and they've been killing it, reaching $7B valuation as of last year. Both the company I was advising and Weave.works decided to stick to the developer productivity story and unfortunately both have now shut down. There are many factors to a company's success but it doesn't help to be positioned as a solution that's seen as just a "nice-to-have" or part of a "best practice."
Productivity is a hard sell for a company that is tech focused. Since a client basically can't measure the impact there is little external difference between a true solution and a fake solution. As a result even if you convince someone of the value a company that focuses on marketing to those paying the bills will win out against one that focused on building a better product.
Security has fairly proscriptive compliance requirements (ie: SOC, etc.) which provide a benchmark against which to measure impact. Not impact on security but impact on meeting the compliance requirements.
My experience with the CISO org is that they love buying expensive B2B enterprise products that have very limited real-life use-cases but are really good at checking boxes. That whole cloud-native security industry is full of FUD and fear-based selling to non technical organizations
King.
Weaveworks created “GitOps” as a buzzword.
Weaveworks created and/or substantially funded these Open Source projects:
- FluxCD
- Cortex (scalable Prometheus)
- Weave Net
- Weave Scope (seen in 2023 KubeCon keynote)
- EKSctl
- Kubeadm
- Kspan
Plus many others.
Then commercial versions of some OSS projects.
Probably consultancy was the biggest revenue source overall.
That is a curious KPI.
How do you place a value on Microsoft building Flux into Azure Arc? I know it isn't worth $0 but do they actually need a contract with anybody (at Flux or Weaveworks) in order to go on doing that - no. They don't need one.
1: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex?tab=readme-ov-file
One thing to bear in mind is that at Weaveworks we made massive contributions and did our best to be part of the community in the right way:
* Flux * Flagger * Cortex * Ignite * Weave Net * and a whole host more
Oh and there's a load of people without jobs tonight - wondering about their futures - hopefully people will see the talent and the contributions and find roles for them.
They actually had that when the first started.
>> Kinda like docker or python or something
There's a lesson here in the difficulty of selling to developers.
https://github.com/microservices-demo/microservices-demo
I have seen others are still using it but not officially from anyone at Weaveworks
It would have been very very far from what you usually call an exit, though. Nobody would have cashed out, except maybe some of the VCs and I'm not sure if they'd have called it a successful exit in terms of financial win.
“ The company was turning over double digit (>$10M) revenue and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023.”
Sounds like he was measuring the wrong things.
“I could say that this should not have happened, but I know that we are not alone in this market.”
Sounds like he’s justifying his failure by point at others in the market.
Written like a Wall Street trader. Oh wait…