Weaveworks Kubernetes Platform 2.4 GA

Weaveworks Kubernetes Platform 2.4 GA

December 2, 2020

Weaveworks released 2.4 of Weave Kubernetes Platform (WKP). GitOps is the gold standard for Kubernetes operating models, centralizing every aspect of cloud-native development, operations, and lifecycle management. The release of the production-ready WKP 2.4 is the critical link to scaling GitOps across organizations of any size, supporting fleet-scale 5G and other edge deployments.

“With WKP 2.4, we’re levelling up the playing field for enterprises scaling up their use of Kubernetes. With our new team workspaces feature, multi-tenancy and large-scale application deployments are easy to manage and secure. WKP gives customers the keys to unlocking the power of Kubernetes and GitOps at scale — to many thousands of deployments across multi clouds, bare metal, hybrid and the edge. This represents another step in our vision to accelerate and simplify application management in Kubernetes and to empower developer teams to out-innovate their competition,” said Alexis Richardson, founder and CEO of Weaveworks.

“We would recommend WKP as it allows us to own and manage our applications with a unified workflow across all Kubernetes environments. We’ve adopted the GitOps approach for deployments and life-cycle management: this gives us the on-demand ability to scale easily and securely depending on the usage by our customers. As we expand our cloud-native deployment, WKP is helping us increase agility, build robust operations and scale our deployments,“ said Lance Allred, Infrastructure Manager, Datascan.

GitOps is the basis of Weaveworks’ approach to helping customers deploy cloud systems at scale and with velocity. The business value WKP delivers is developer productivity and reliability, and when in use development teams experience significant improvements to key DevOps agility metrics. These include an increase in Release Frequency (RF) of up to 75%, a substantial reduction in operational tasks pushing up productivity, and a reduction of Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) to 20 minutes.

Weave Kubernetes Platform is a GitOps platform that uses a modular approach to enable deployment in a wide range of environments from cloud and on-prem data centers to edge based clusters. It enables enterprises to safely use Kubernetes across a variety of software teams in a multi-tenant set-up that also delivers application portability across clouds and hybrid deployments. WKP incorporates the most innovative open source projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with production grade stability, resiliency and business critical enterprise features.

What’s New In WKP 2.4

Add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster

With WKP 2.4 customers can simply add GitOps to any Kubernetes cluster, without reprovisioning clusters first. The git based management of cluster components, team workspaces and observability makes it simple for organizations with existing Kubernetes estates to migrate to GitOps.

Multi-tenancy with Team Workspaces

WKP includes a new version of Team Workspaces, so enterprise teams can segment responsibility, enforce change control policies, and work together seamlessly while increasing velocity and decreasing errors and governance overhead. WKP enables git based workflows that provide clear change control and audit logs. DevOps teams that use familiar git workflows drastically decrease the time from code to production.

Application portability with Team Workspaces

Team workspaces makes it easy to deploy the same application into many different clusters even across cloud and hybrid environments, reducing operational complexity and costs. Cluster operators can assign a team to workspaces in multiple clusters, allowing change deployments across the fleet via git.

The segmented access feature facilitates coordination between multiple development and operations teams across large organizations.

Kubernetes anywhere

Weaveworks is committed to growing and extending the cluster lifecycle management API (CAPI) which provides a standard declarative cluster definition format and a set of installers and reconciliation agents.

WKP 2.4 uses CAPI to enable Kubernetes installation across all major target environments and supports GitOps for on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud kubernetes clusters.

Edge Kubernetes deployments

WKP 2.4 includes a new CAPI provider “CAPEI” (Cluster API for Existing Infrastructure) that leverages existing provisioning systems (e.g. Terraform) to install kubernetes cluster management on pre-provisioned machines. CAPEI uses an innovative light-weight approach that does not require a central management cluster, making it suitable for ephemeral or intermittently connected environments, such as Edge and Far Edge.