Leading Cloud and Telecom providers Invest 36M in Series C to Accelerate GitOps

[weaveworks]

I am very happy to let you know that today Weaveworks announces a new round of Series C financing.

Our investors are global leaders in cloud computing, telecommunications and media. Amazon Web Services (AWS), DTCP Telekom Investment Pool (TIP), Ericsson Ventures, Orange Ventures, and Sonae Investment Management join Accel, GV, and Redline Capital in a $36.65M investment round. This investment builds on years of triple digit growth and recognises Weaveworks’ success enabling enterprise customers to deliver their Kubernetes-based application platforms in a multi-cloud environment. I feel we have come a long way.

Weaveworks is the GitOps company

Our mission is to make it easy for enterprise developers to deploy and operate applications on Kubernetes using GitOps. Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP) streamlines delivery from development to production, and improves security, compliance and resilience. Combined with our world leading open source GitOps tools like Flux, EKSctl, and Flagger, WKP is the configurable platform that our customers need for modern applications.

GitOps and containers matter today but they will be critical technologies in the future. Containers will be how we ship and run many applications as well as high productivity application platforms eg. serverless. GitOps will be how we manage them. Let’s look at this through the lens of the major industry trends that drove Weaveworks latest investment round.

Trends create the need for a new platform

We all know that software applications are critical to modern customer interactions. What are the visible trends shaping those applications and how they are deployed and managed?

1. Cloud Native applications become the norm as cloud expands. Each public cloud is expanding its reach to “attached compute” due to high speed networking; including enterprise, multi cloud, 5G, edge, cars, etc. In this setting, containers provide a portable model to ship and run a wide range of applications, services, etc, that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes.

2. Developer Productivity is a critical source of competitive value. Demand for developers is growing beyond what anyone can possibly meet, as software powers even more experiences and business activities. But there is already a massive global skills shortage, especially for cloud native and Kubernetes. All market indicators show this problem getting bigger.

3. Operations Automation will be how enterprises manage cost. Running software the way AWS and Netflix do is becoming the norm. As organisations scale, they struggle to manage costs and find enough skilled developers and engineers. The only effective way to scale is to automate.

Together these factors imply that enterprises must standardise on how they develop, ship and operate applications. But they cannot use a one-size-fits-all infrastructure from one vendor, since we are in a multi-cloud and edge/5G environment with heterogeneous applications.

The conclusion of these requirements is that we need a highly configurable, cloud native platform. This platform must address both sides of the DevOps coin -- operations automation and developer productivity.

5G reinforces the need for this new platform

Our investment includes several telco partners. Every telco is rolling out 5G, which means “5th generation networks” that promise ultrafast wireless broadband to any device. Pretty much anything can now be a 5G-connected computer capable of running applications. For example people’s devices, homes, cars, cities, and business and social infrastructure.

When 5G is combined with cloud computing, this radically changes the economics of creating new digital experiences. Essentially any software can be delivered anywhere it is needed, and keep a high bandwidth internet connection for rich user experiences. Everything will be managed remotely using software. That means fewer expensive hardware renewals and on-site visits, which are replaced by a shift to edge computing in software.

I think this will power a second Internet boom. In the 1990s browsers, websites and broadband laid the foundations for eBay, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Many of these ran on a common technology platform (the LAMP stack). In this second big shift, devices, cloud services and 5G will lead to new businesses like smart personal healthcare, immersive gaming, automated urban services. All of these will need a new platform to enable their software applications. This platform will enable continuous operations, progressive delivery and fleet scale deployment of cloud native applications

Weaveworks provides the configurable platform for multi-cloud

We provide the Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP), a configurable platform for applications that use Kubernetes. WKP includes full multi-cloud Kubernetes management and support options plus enterprise GitOps features for accelerated and progressive delivery, add-ons management, policy and fleets.

1. Cluster Management Platform. WKP works with both managed cloud services (eg. EKS, AKS, GKE) and supported open source distributions (eg. CNCF, EKS-D). It includes opt-in supported core Kubernetes add-ons (eg. for deployment, observability) that most customers ask to run on their clusters, delivering a ‘table stakes’ platform.
2. Continuous Operations and Progressive Delivery. WKP uses GitOps to automate deployment pipelines that manage applications plus the add-ons needed to run as a ‘stack’ on a fleet of Kubernetes clusters. Solving this problem manually is possible at a small scale. WKP adds enterprise GitOps features to make it scale securely.

For developers, WKP includes built-in Workspaces that simplify the onboarding of teams for secure app development. Purpose-specific Workspaces enable developers to pre-load any necessary cluster add-ons with GitOps, for example a “data science platform” environment might have Tensorflow and other ML tools needed for their development stack. All of these different stacks can then benefit from CD, policy and management. And all of WKP’s standard OSS components are also supported by a CVE patch stream delivered by GitOps.

At scale, GitOps enables customers to tame complexity. Imagine 100s of different applications running on multiple clusters, each with their own add-on dependencies. Different teams own each stack and operate under a variety of security and policy regimes. In GitOps this is fundamentally a problem solved by configuration management adapted to Kubernetes. GitOps provides a standard way to patch, maintain and support whole stacks of components attached to Kubernetes, thereby providing a remotely operated management story for cloud native.

Onwards and upwards

Please come with us on this journey. We offer professional services and open source as a starting point, or contact us about our commercial products. We have an amazing team of wonderful people who want to help you. And we are hiring.

Along with containers, WKP and GitOps are transforming enterprise IT, enabling modern applications that accelerate revenue, along with standard operational practices that lower risk and cost. This enables enterprises to scale their cloud native estate no matter where applications are deployed. We remove the manual steps and complexity from Kubernetes, instead enabling automated pipelines, progressive delivery and continuous operations.

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