How Weaveworks pioneered GitOps and brought containers into the mainstream

The classic “Eureka!” moment during which a person envisions a groundbreaking concept is rare. Most innovative concepts evolve from a series of team solutions that link together to create something revolutionary. Sometimes it takes a trigger event to realize that what seemed commonplace is actually a game-changer.

This is the case for the origin story of GitOps.

“We’d learned how to operate Kubernetes, and we discovered that we were doing it in this specific way, a way that meant that we could be reliable, we could set things up remotely, we could move things between zones,” said Alexis Richardson (pictured), GitOps pioneer and founder and chief executive officer of Weaveworks Inc. “After we had an outage and made a very quick recovery, [we] told people about it and they said, ‘Well, we can’t even get Kubernetes started, let alone recover it from a crash.’”

Richardson spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations event on Jan. 26. They discussed the creation of GitOps and how GitOps and Weaveworks together made Kubernetes adoption simpler for large corporations. (* Disclosure below.)

The GitOps and Weaveworks story

Weaveworks pioneered GitOps in 2017. But roll back a few years to 2014, when container technology was still in the early stages. Richardson was working at Pivotal Software Inc. as head of the application platform. He saw the potential containers had to facilitate the growth of cloud, but he also saw a problem.

“These new containers were pretty cool, but they were really complex operational centric tools, and enterprise developers need simplicity,” he said.

So, Richardson and some of his Pivotal team members founded Weaveworks with the mission to make container development easier.

Weaveworks was formed as an open-source company with a commercial software-as-a-service offering. The critical decision Richardson and his team made was to base the company’s SaaS on Kubernetes. This made them one of the very first companies to start running Kubernetes in production other than Google, according to Richardson.

Fast forward again to when the Weaveworks team discovered that, thanks to years of working with Kubernetes, they’d created a new methodology to reliably run Kubernetes in production and at scale. They named this process GitOps. “Which is really DevOps for Kubernetes,” Richardson said.

As the company started evangelizing GitOps, they kept getting requests to help set up and run Kubernetes at the enterprise level. So, the company made a pivot away from SaaS and back into enterprise software, providing a solution for people to run Kubernetes stacks, deploy applications, detect drifts, and operate them at scale.

“And we’ve never looked back,” Richardson stated.

Weaveworks helps Fidelity Investments create a GitOps-driven ‘augmented Kubernetes platform for enterprise’

Fidelity Investments Inc. was one of Weaveworks first major customers after the pivot. The company had been using Weavework’s open-source tools and wanted to run Kubernetes on AWS using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. It’s goal was to create a shared application platform that employees could use across the company to deploy and manage apps. But they needed help.

Using GitOps, Weaveworks helped Fidelity build their FIDEKS finance-grade cloud-native application platform. It was a first in that the whole stack was managed by GitOps. This was critical, in that it made being able to start, stop and manipulate Kubernetes clusters simpler.

“If you talk to people about what’s hard in IT, they’ll tell you shutting down Kubernetes is hard, because I know I’m never going to know how to start it again,” Richardson said.

Weaveworks went on to duplicate the entire environment for Fidelity on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and on-premises.

“Today the whole Fidelity platform runs on Microsoft, and on Amazon, and on-premise using three different implementations of Kubernetes,” Richardson said.

Kubernetes enables application speed and operational competence

Agility has been key for companies as they met the challenges brought by climate disasters, COVID-19, and the economic and political uncertainties of the past couple of years. This need to scale rapidly has driven an uptick in cloud computing and Kubernetes adoption in enterprise across all industries, which in turn has opened the door for new technologies using artificial intelligence, according to Richardson.

“Everyone’s excited about the potential for automation,” he stated. “With Kubernetes in this new era, you can reduce your operational loads so that very few people are needed to keep systems up, to do basic monitoring, to do redeployments and so on, which are all boring infrastructure tasks that no developer wants to do.”

Meeting the needs of the modern information technology environment, in November 2021 Weaveworks announced the general availability of its Weave GitOps Enterprise solution. A licensed product that builds on the company’s free open-source Weave GitOps core, Weave GitOps Enterprise enables customers to build critical use cases using GitOps, which gives them higher security, lower costs of management, more efficient operations, and higher velocity, Richardson pointed out.

“It is taking all the best practices that we’ve learned, starting from those days of running our own Kubernetes stack and then through those early customers like Fidelity, into the modern era,” he stated. “All of it is enabling what we call the cloud-native enterprise: application delivery, modern operations.”

More announcements from Weaveworks are in the pipeline, according to Richardson, who tells the audience to keep their eye on the company’s website in the coming weeks.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations event. (* Disclosure: Weaveworks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Weaveworks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE