Weaveworks launches first enterprise Gitops platform

Weaveworks is making its first enterprise-grade Gitops platform generally available today. Called Weave GitOps Enterprise, the proprietary platform aims to automate continuous application delivery and Kubernetes operations tasks across any environment, to help organisations adopt Gitops principles at enterprise scale.

Since being coined in 2017 by the Weaveworks founder Alexis Richardson, Gitops has emerged as a natural evolution of modern software development practices like devops, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD.

At its heart, Gitops extends devops primarily by treating infrastructure as code, allowing both the application and its underlying infrastructure to be provisioned and managed programmatically. Deployments are driven by code stored in a version control system, typically Git, providing a single source of truth for both dev and ops.

Done right, Gitops allows for all changes to be pushed through declarative code, with a set of automated steps that corrects any deviations from the desired state.

What is the Weave GitOps platform?

Initially announced in June, Weave Gitops is available in two tiers:

• Weave GitOps Core – a free and open source version of the platform to give developers a taste of the capabilities on any Kubernetes cluster using just two commands.
• Weave GitOps Enterprise – further enables continuous operations and control of Kubernetes at enterprise scale by automatically detecting state drift and health issues and by providing a hub to store, manage, and reuse cluster templates. Further, the Enterprise edition extends granular team management controls and single sign on, and offers 24/7 support.

Both tiers essentially provide a central hub for developers and operators to ensure their actual state matches the desired state by scanning repositories for any new versions and managing dependencies, all while monitoring and alerting for workload health issues.

Since June, Weaveworks has added several features to its enterprise product ahead of making it generally available. These include a web-based user interface, component profiles for easier service discovery, consistent support for both on-premises and cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters, and a multi-cluster control plane for simplified operations tasks and greater monitoring and observability.

Despite the promise, enterprise adoption of Gitops has been tentative, barring some keen early movers. Weaveworks will hope that a fully assembled platform like this one, alongside other industry efforts to ease adoption—such as the vendor’s Gitops maturity model and the vendor-neutral Gitops working group—should help ease any concerns for curious organisations.

Pricing for Weave GitOps Enterprise is dependent on the number of Kubernetes nodes running in development or production, starting at US$12,000 for up to eight nodes in development and US$3,000 per node in production, starting with a minimum of 10 nodes.