Weaveworks Raises $5M To Help Bring Containers To The Enterprise

Weaveworks (formerly known as Zettio), is one of the many companies in the quickly growing ecosystem of Docker-related companies. The service was founded by  Alexis Richardson and Matthias Radestock, the team that also built the RabbitMQ message broker. Weaveworks wants to help developers build and migrate their applications to run on container technology.

The company today announced that it has raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Accel Partners. Accel Partners’ Kevin Comolli will join Weave’s board. The company says it will use the funding to expand its product development team and expand its U.S. organization to complement its team in London.

In its current form, Weave creates a software-defined network that allows Docker to network containers across multiple hosts. It basically provides a virtual ethernet switch that connects all the different containers in a network. The service integrates well with most of the other players in the Docker ecosystem, including the likes of CoreOS and Kubernetes.

Even though Weave only launched in September, it’s already one of the top Docker-related projects on GitHub.

The company also recently launched a preview of weaveDNS, a distributed DNS service for Weave networks that allows you to use names instead of IP addresses to make service discovery on these networks a bit easier.

“Early adopters are already reporting ‘10x’ wins and cost savings from containerization”, said Alexis Richardson, Weaveworks’s CEO today. “Weave aims to bring those gains to everyone, by focusing on ease of use. Our approach is to follow proven Unix and Internet modular design principles and APIs, so that customers never have to learn a new skill, never have to use unproven operational tooling, and never have to fundamentally rewrite applications.”