Celebrating 100 team members at Weaveworks
t's been a busy summer for Weaveworks. First Weave GitOps Core has been accelerating with regular new releases. Then this month we hit another milestone with the company growing to 100 people! That's right, this month we have 100 dedicated GitOps'ers spread around the world - a ton of GitOps! And, we're just getting started ...
It's been a busy summer for Weaveworks. First Weave GitOps Core has been accelerating with regular new releases. Then this month we hit another milestone with the company growing to 100 people! That's right, this month we have 100 dedicated GitOps'ers spread around the world - a ton of GitOps! And, we're just getting started ...
To put the journey to 100 people into context, think back to 2014 when Weaveworks was formed. In 2014 Docker was 'hip' (hard to believe the word ‘hip’ was hip even in 2014), there was no Kubernetes, no CNCF and no-one was talking about GitOps! The world of application operations has changed beyond all recognition since then.
Though the technologies have changed, our focus has remained the same - bringing the benefits of cloud native to development and devops teams. Alexis Richardson, CEO said in our Series A press release,
“Early adopters are already reporting ‘10x’ wins and cost savings from containerization. Weave aims to bring those gains to everyone, by focusing on ease of use ... so that customers never have to learn a new skill, never have to use unproven operational tooling, and never have to fundamentally rewrite applications.”
That focus remains, today we work with customers on every cloud and across many industries so they can achieve those business benefits of "10x wins and cost savings". Helping their technology teams to speed up delivery by automating application deployment, and operate more efficiently by using GitOps management.
While the goal is the same, the Cloud Native technology stack has changed beyond all recognition. That's why with Weave GitOps Core we’re making it simple for teams to get started running applications on any Kubernetes - AKS, EKS, GKE, Rancher and anything else! With our Enterprise tier, customers can manage different Kubernetes environments and use them in distinct ways (on-premise, multi-cloud and hybrid environments).
As the company has grown and changed we've continued to be committed to developing our community of users, and our contributions to open source. Our community channels are vibrant with fantastic activities (like GitOps Days, our annual community event featuring contributors, thought leaders and end users). Community and Open Source are foundations in our ethos and inform how we build and work on our technologies.
Now, as someone pointed out to me, there are actually more than 100 Weaveworkers! That's because we stand on the shared efforts of all our previous colleagues. Weaveworks alumni - you know who you are - you've been massive contributors to building our technology, company and culture - so THANK YOU.
And, alumni are in my thoughts because this week Cornelia Davis announced that she's leaving Weaveworks. I’d like to thank Cornelia for her work to define GitOps and develop it into a modern operations toolset. The world of AI may be very different - but I’m sure she'll be a passionate advocate for GitOps and modern application operations (our podcast series “The Art of Modern Ops” led by Cornelia is a series of interviews with visionaries and practitioners of those practices)!
One hundred people is a fantastic milestone. It's amazing seeing so many people on our all team calls and feeling the energy across the team. How will we navigate the next stage, and what does it mean for our team, users and customers?
Well, in part driven by the pandemic, our approach to how people work in Weaveworks has changed. We're a 100 person company with people spread around the globe in a "remote-first" culture. We put emphasis on respecting the diverse cultural and individual needs of our team. We've been able to grow as a team because of the hard work, resilience and humour that everyone displays daily. I believe we'll navigate the next phase just as well - learning and developing how we collaborate together towards our company vision.
With the cloud native world maturing we’ll continue to develop how GitOps can make modern operations simple and powerful. We want every development team to have those "10x wins". The best developer experience when shipping software is no experience at all, just "git push done". We need to bring that experience to every level of application operations, through the entire life-cycle and to every platform where teams want to deploy to production!
If that’s something you’d like to take part in then we’d love you to try out Weave GitOps Core and join our community - we’re always looking for feedback. And, if you’d like to go a step further we’re hiring and building our team - there's lots to be done, and we’d love your contribution!
