Weaveworks has added new capabilities to its Weave Cloud container-based microservices management platform designed to make it easier for app developers to create, deploy, manage, and monitor microservices and container-based applications.

Weave Cloud is an operations platform used mainly by app developers. It can be installed alongside Kubernetes, Docker, Mesos, or Amazon ECS, and it gives developers additional features, including management, monitoring, and security, Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson said.

New features in the Weave Cloud Enterprise Edition (EE) tier include:

• Incident management with historical audit, instant query, and comprehensive dashboards.
• Release automation and point-in-time rollback for Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.
• Advanced Kubernetes troubleshooting including resource-container mapping.

The tools can be used to validate apps against previous versions and against other apps.

“They are packaged to look like application development tools, but they’re really operational tools. That’s one of the new things here,” Richardson explained. “Previously you had operations, and they had operational tools, and you had development and they had development tools, and they were totally different.

"Now there’s application operations, which is a variant of DevOps, where you write the application, and you own the code in production, which means your expectations about how to operate it have changed. You need to fix applications in the code rather than just getting alerts.

“We’ve solved that problem by uniting different previously separate aspects of the developer lifecycle with operations,” he continued. “We can combine monitoring with deployment, for example, which is a very different thing than what you could do before.”

Previously, companies doing application development had to assemble all these capabilities from multiple products from different vendors, Richardson said. “It was time-consuming, expensive, and fragile – you’d end up with multiple different results across a company. We’ve assembled all these capabilities for containerized applications all in one place.”

The approach allows developers to fix problems immediately and ship development changes rapidly.

Richardson said Weaveworks further differentiates itself by allowing its customers to choose the type of application, the orchestration tool, and/or the cloud the app will run on. “Others in the market take the approach that they’ll give you everything, but you have to bet on their application platform. We’re freeing people from those constraints while giving them the tools to get to an operational state very quickly,” Richardson said.

Weaveworks has been deliberately targeting smaller customers. But the new features are meant to be attractive to larger customers, hence the “Enterprise Edition” tag.

Weave Cloud supports all container orchestration platforms including Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. As a Kubernetes add-on, it is 100 percent compatible with the underlying platforms, the company said.