Alexis Richardson is a big advocate of the emerging cloud native computing paradigm, serving as the chair of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At his day job, he is the CEO and co-founder of Weaveworks, which is aiming to build a cloud native business, providing organizations with a platform to monitor and manage cloud native deployments.
Weaveworks has several core open-source applications, including Weave Net, which is a software-defined networking (SDN) technology for containers, and Weave Scope, a visualization tool for container microservices. In June 2016, Weaveworks announced the Weave Cloud, providing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Weaveworks’ applications with an integrated dashboard to help organizations optimize container deployments.
Now in 2017, Weaveworks is taking the next step with the company’s new Enterprise Edition that provides higher levels of service and new deployment capabilities. In a video interview with eWEEK, Richardson details what’s new in the Enterprise Edition and where his company is headed.
“We run everything on Kubernetes,” Richardson said. “If you can install Kubernetes, you can install Weave Cloud.”
When Weaveworks first started, the initial project was the Weave Net Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology for container networking. Weave Net is a core part of the Weaveworks Cloud Enterprise Edition, providing the necessary components to help enable organizations to successfully manage container networking.
Richardson said that with cloud native computing, organizations want to build applications and not infrastructure. He noted that many organizations tell him that what they want is invisible infrastructure. That model works well until something goes wrong, which is when organizations tend to want some form of visible infrastructure.
“You don’t want it (infrastructure) to be visible,” Richardson said. “But when something goes wrong, you want help fixing it, as quickly as possible.”
Watch the full video interview with Alexis Richardson above.