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Weaveworks is shutting down

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Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#201

Post by dilyevsky »

api wrote: post #93
gtirloni wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the comment you're replying to meant to say developers are cheap in the sense they allergic to spending money, not that their time/salary is cheap. Example: "John is a cheap bastard. He never spends any money or buys the cheapest options".

Yes that's what I meant. I think the aversion to lock-in or recurring expense is stronger than merely an unwillingness to spend money.

I am wondering why does the cloud gets a pass then? It’s all three - the lock in, recurring and also ridiculously expensive

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#202

Post by denysvitali »

pmig wrote: post #90

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else? But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

The UI makes it easier to sell it to non-engineers.

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.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#203

Post by vidarh »

rjzzleep wrote: post #173
lesam wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sense why this is true? 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?

Don't VC companies basically gamble with other peoples money? So yes, the person that actually put the money into the fund might want 1x or 1.5x out over 0x, but for the VC firm it doesn't matter, right? It's not their money to begin with.

LPs in a VC fund know very well what the fund is incentivised to deliver. I worked for one, and our LPs would aggressively write low performers down to zero. It didn't matter to them either. Obviously wouldn't turn it down if still possible once all else has failed, but retaining even a fraction of a percent shot at a higher return was what mattered most, even knowing it was extremely unlikely.

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.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#204

Post by nullify88 »

mac-chaffee wrote: post #189
FourierEnvy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better UI

I personally consider the ArgoCD UI an anti-feature. Attaching some hulking mass of Javascript dependencies to the thing that has cluster-admin rights to my production cluster is unnecessary attack surface for me. 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…

Redis is also a requirement to run Argo CD. When comparing load on my home server, flux was much lighter. Flux also has a pretty cool terraform controller too.

At work though, we use Argo and our developers use its gui to get an overview on their applications.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#205

Post by makkes »

JojoFatsani wrote: post #75
fxtentacle wrote: post #7

"a very promising M&A process with a larger company fell through at the 11th hour. And so we decided to shut down"

Sad that some of the folks behind Weave didn't get a possibly life-changing exit.

The acquisition talked about in the original post wasn't much more than a life-saver for the company so in that regard you could call it life-changing in that many of the fine folks I worked with wouldn't have lost their job.

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.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#206

Post by suriyaG »

esafak wrote: post #171
marcinzm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. 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.…

If you can't measure the benefit, why would you pay more for security? Just get the cheapest thing that checks the boxes...

I think, in simpler terms. There's always a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). But, there's rarely a Chief Productivity Officer. It's usually the CTO et al fighting for dev productivity if any, else nobody just cares and you get impenetrable tarball software

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#207

Post by hef19898 »

burningChrome wrote: post #123
propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. 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 lo…

>> How do you find yourself as Board member or CEO of a company like this and not think to cut expenses a little sooner? 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…

Seems VC backed start-ups are the real lifestyle companies for their founders, doesn't it?

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#208

Post by abhiyerra »

mad_vill wrote: post #13

I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. 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.

This is what we are doing with my company. We build out tooling that benefits everyone and open source most of it, but our bread and butter is consulting. Our consulting leads us to build more tooling to make our jobs easier, which leads to more effectively delivering our consulting.

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.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#209

Post by hef19898 »

purpleblue wrote: post #109
propter_hoc wrote: post #83

I know this isn't the craziest startup shutdown story, but wow. 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 lo…

Because no one that matters cares about a company that makes $10 million per year, neither the cofounders nor the board. Everyone wants 100x that because they want to become 9 figure wealthy or more. Better to close down, fuck the customers, and then have the cofounders start a new "journey" in hopes of getting that unicorn status and become fabulously wealthy.

I know that you are right, it is just so incredibly stupid.

Re: Weaveworks is shutting down

#210

Post by pmig »

alwyn wrote: post #96
pmig wrote: post #90

Flux for me was always superior to ArgoCD from a technical point of view, but they over the years ArgoCD became the more popular tool. I wonder if it was marketing, the missing UI or something else? But super sad to see weaveworks shutting down I hope that the open source projects will continue to evolve.

I've never used Flux, only Argo, but can you share a bit from your point of view on why you find Flux to be technically superior? Thanks!

One if the decision points for us using Flux was the the helm controller. ArgoCD will just render the helm chart and apply the manifests. If you already habe an Helm Release in your cluster the migration path was easier with flux.
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