Summary

To support the conversion to 'cloud native' and provide a short cut to delivering the benefit of Kubernetes in successful application outcomes for enterprises, Weaveworks has assembled a portfolio of developer enablement tools and operations services. Success here is defined as more frequent deployments, shorter lead times, lower failure rates and faster recovery from failures.


The 451 Take

Every company is becoming a service provider, creating digital services in order to better engage with customers, partners and suppliers and compete in the digital economy. Software is a currency in this economy and every company must raise its software IQ in order to succeed. Cloud is the operating model for this digital transformation, delivering what 451 Research 4SIGHT refers to as 'Invisible Infrastructure', which is consumption-based and service-driven with a retail model discipline. The direction of travel for enterprises adopting cloud in order to transform their businesses – and where the industry is heading – is 'cloud native': containers, microservices, service mesh, Kubernetes, serverless and more. This is Weaveworks' wheelhouse and there's a feeding frenzy of market and investor interest plus real practice (see GitHub, CNCF). Being heard above the noise and translating this into revenue is a tough transformation itself. Weaveworks has the expertise, provenance and executive bench to put it among the front-runners here.

Lifecycle

A ground-to-cloud lifecycle begins with road mapping and guided technology choices as part of the company's Weave Cloud Ready Program. Consulting and training for developer teams and set up follows. The Weave Cloud subscription service delivers DevOps and developer enablement in the form of management, continuous delivery and CI/CD automation and monitoring and observability. The Weave Kubernetes Subscription is designed to take this and provide operations at scale (support, compliance, audit and security add-ons). The two services are now equal citizens in terms of Weaveworks' business and seen as complementary in the stack.

 

Weave Cloud

Weave Cloud is aimed at simplifying containers and microservices deployment, monitoring and management, specifically supporting DevOps in Kubernetes via an integrated platform. Weaveworks sees this as the place where GitHub meets operations to accelerate the delivery of applications on the cloud. The developer pipeline Weave Cloud supports is building applications, making changes, deploying 'canary' releases and monitoring their health and user experience. Its use cases include production workloads, container security, hybrid cloud and multicast networking – all of which are supported with continuous delivery pipelines.

It takes advantage of Weaveworks' open source projects:
  • Weave Cortex is an add-on for the Prometheus database that adds scale and long-term storage (remote write). Cortex is the monitoring back end of Weave Cloud.
  • Weave Flux is a lightweight version of Spinnaker for deploying (service routing) container images enabling continuous release management by linking CI and CD, which use Kubernetes. It can be used with Jenkins, CircleCI, Drone and other mechanisms.
  • Weave Scope is a visualization and monitoring tool for Docker and Kubernetes, and has some 50,000 users.
  • Weave Net is a virtual network connecting Docker containers across multiple hosts and enabling their automatic discovery.
  • Weave Cloud is integrated with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes, Docker Swarm/UCP, AWS ECS and EKS, Apache Mesos and Mesosphere DC/OS. It costs $30 a month for a standard subscription and $150 a month for enterprises.

 

Kubernetes Subscription

According to the CNCF, Kubernetes is now the second largest open source project behind Linux. Little wonder there are now a raft of enterprise Kubernetes offerings on the market. The problem is they all come with a catch – or at least a hook, and Weaveworks believes customers don't want to be tied down. Mesosphere requires Kubernetes to run on Mesos. In the case of Red Hat, if a customer wants to use something that's not RHEL, or just want to use Kubernetes, then why pay Red Hat for OpenShift? If a company is using Canonical Kubernetes, it is really buying Ubuntu, in its view. Similarly, Rancher Labs, Pivotal, VMware, AWS and Google also each have their dependencies. By contrast, there is a growing discussion around 'vanilla' Kubernetes – unencumbered by any vendor-specific dependencies – as the way to go. One of the issues is that the industry has been conditioned to see 'vanilla' approaches to code – especially open source – as essentially the 'Wild West,' which requires additional management and support to make it enterprise-grade.

To address this, Weaveworks earlier this year extended its business model to deliver Kubernetes support subscription and consulting services for enterprises. The Kubernetes Support Subscription provides 24/7 support, fixes and patches for production-grade deployments of Kubernetes, including Kubeadm, Kops and other components. The move doubled down on Weaveworks' experience with cloud-native technologies (CEO Alexis Richardson is chair of the CNCF technical committee). It believes traditional distribution models (such as Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical) are not fit for the next phase of innovation around cloud native. Weaveworks has a global team of site-reliability engineers who have operated Kubernetes as a production service since 2015.

Weaveworks points to a number of key technologies for use with Kubernetes: Prometheus (for monitoring), Istio service mesh, Helm package manager, OpenFaaS Operator serverless and its own Weave Flux, which monitors image repositories and when it detects new images, it triggers deployments and updates the manifests in Git and then updates the cluster.

 

GitOps and Business Model

GitOps

The company has been using the term GitOps to describe what it believes to be best practices – an operating model – when it comes to doing DevOps for Kubernetes. Weaveworks has been promoting GitOps as a methodology to help organizations move from Kubernetes adoption to implementation. Practically, GitOps is a way to do continuous delivery. It works by using Git as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and applications and continually checking images to ensure coherency, updating where necessary. Crucially GitOps enables developers to build and test – and but does not automatically kick this into production. Weaveworks has sought to establish GitOps as an industry-wide approach – it's become a de facto mission statement for Weaveworks.

Business model

The 40-person Weaveworks began offering its first product in September 2014, and has raised $25m in A and B funding rounds from Google Ventures, Accel Partners and Redline Capital Management. We'd expect a C round to follow as it seeks to develop a leading market position supporting the cloud native conversion now sweeping the industry, as well as escape velocity for investors. Weaveworks says it is generating revenue, and customers typically are ones trying out Kubernetes or Docker; those working on monitoring, observability and Prometheus; CI/CD and GitOps; and Istio, Tensorflow and serverless users.

 

Competition

Weaveworks' key competition are companies offering Kubernetes distributions, management and monitoring, a developer 'experience' portfolio and routing and mesh services. Weave Cloud Deploy competes with Harness, Armory and Pulumi – Weave Kubernetes subscription competes with Heptio and Red Hat.


Weaveworks SWOT Figure 1

William Fellows
Founder & Research Vice President

William Fellows is a cofounder of The 451 Group. As VP of Research, he is responsible for the Cloud Transformation Channel at 451 Research. This Channel provides a point of intellectual convergence for 451 Research around cloud computing, in much the same way that the industry is converging on cloud from all points.

Jeremy Korn
Research Associate

Jeremy Korn is a Research Associate at 451 Research. He graduated from Brown University with a BA in Biology and East Asian Studies and received a MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, where he employed quantitative and qualitative methodologies to study the Chinese film industry.

Aaron Sherrill
Senior Analyst

Aaron Sherrill is a Senior Analyst for 451 Research covering emerging trends, innovation and disruption in the Managed Services and Managed Security Services sectors. Aaron has 20+ years of experience across several industries including serving in IT management for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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