ClusterHQ, a San Francisco-based container-products startup, is shutting down operations effective immediately, chairman Mark Davis wrote in a blog post entitled “ClusterF***ed.”
In addition to Flocker, a container orchestrator, ClusterHQ offered Hub, a repository for sharing code; and Fli, a product that allows copying, pushing and pulling data volumes.
“When Flocker 0.1 was launched in early August 2014, we were about the only people talking about stateful containers,” Davis wrote. “Nowadays, seems like everybody is talking about stateful containers. . . . For a confluence of reasons, the ClusterHQ board of directors have decided to immediately shut down company operations.”
He provided no additional details on the reasons for the shutdown. ClusterHQ received a total of $18 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase.
Containers are portable bundles of application code, libraries and other pieces of a run-time environment. Stateful applications that are run in a container (sometimes referred to as stateful containers) retain information entered by the user, while stateless ones dump or never collect that information. Statelessness is generally preferred in cloud computing because it leads to greater scalability and portability, but statefulness can be important when data is meant to be retained, such as in databases.
The burgeoning container market is “ripe for integration and consolidation, with startups and new vendors working alongside and against established vendors,” wrote 451 Research research manager Jay Lyman in May. Some parts of the market, such as container orchestration, are growing more crowded. Several orchestration products, including market-leader Kubernetes, are already vying for user uptake, and public-cloud giant Amazon Web Services last month jumped into that space with Blox.
