Weaveworks Funding Aimed at Advancing GitOps
Weaveworks announced today it has raised an additional $36.65 million in funding from investors that now include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ericsson, Orange Ventures, SonaeIM and Telekom Investment Pool (TIP).
Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson says those investments are a sign of confidence in the Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP), which makes it possible to automate GitOps-based process across fleets on Kubernetes clusters. In many cases, those fleets of Kubernetes clusters will be managed either by telecommunications carriers or cloud service providers, he says.
At the core of WKP is Flux, an open source tool that automatically ensures that the state of a cluster matches the configuration stored in a Git repository. It uses an operator in the cluster, dubbed Flagger, to trigger application deployments to Kubernetes without requiring IT teams to acquire and deploy a dedicated continuous delivery platform.
Flux monitors all image repositories, detects new images, triggers deployments and updates configurations accordingly. Richardson says WKP adds on top of that core platform Team Workspaces, a workflow application for tracking changes to Git-based deployments that can be used by multiple DevOps teams. Each workspace can also span multiple Kubernetes clusters to simplify the rollout of applications across a fleet of Kubernetes clusters.
Most recently, Weaveworks added support for a cluster lifecycle management API (CAPI) that provides a standard declarative cluster definition format and a set of installers and reconciliation agents for Kubernetes clusters. This latest release also includes support for Cluster API for Existing Infrastructure (CAPEI), which enables IT teams to leverage tools such as Terraform to install Kubernetes cluster management tools on pre-provisioned machines without requiring a central management cluster.
Richardson says telecommunications carriers are increasingly interested in GitOps as it becomes apparent more application workloads will be running on Kubernetes clusters at the network edge that are in effect mini-data centers. Most of the clusters will be running some form of distributed computing applications spanning Kubernetes clusters running at the edge that are connected to cloud applications over a 5G wireless network, he notes. WKP provides the means to remotely update those applications with greater precision without having to dispatch IT personnel to each site, says Richardson.
Achieving that level of automation will prove critical to achieving true hybrid cloud computing by enabling application management to become fully automated, he adds.
Continuous delivery in the enterprise has proven to be elusive because each platform on which IT teams deploy applications is unique. Kubernetes represents an opportunity to employ a level of abstraction that makes it easier to automate the application deployment process by relying on a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Once Kubernetes becomes widely deployed, Kubernetes clusters can automatically pull code from a Git repository versus having to rely on a CD platform to push code to a platform.
It may be a while before IT organizations deploy Kubernetes at a level of scale to make GitOps practical at scale. Nevertheless, providers of IT services are already apparently moving in that direction.
