Weave GitOps - Flux with a Web UI So You Don't Live in kubectl Hell

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Weaveworks went belly-up in February 2024. Classic startup death spiral - burned through their cash and couldn't find more investors willing to throw money at a GitOps tool company. The TechCrunch obituary and CEO's LinkedIn farewell tell the full story. If you were paying for Weave GitOps Enterprise, that was a fun Monday morning email to receive.

The Good News: All the Expensive Shit is Now Free

Here's the silver lining to this corporate graveyard - all those enterprise features that cost thousands per month are now open source. Cluster fleet management, progressive delivery, policy enforcement - all of it. Dead companies can't charge licensing fees, and the CNCF community picked up the pieces.

The latest release v0.39.0-rc.2 shows the community isn't letting this die, but let's be honest about what community maintenance means: slower bug fixes, no guaranteed SLA, and you're dependent on volunteers who fix things when they feel like it.

What Weave GitOps Actually Is (No Marketing Bullshit)

Weave GitOps is Flux with a web UI bolted on top. That's it. If you're comfortable living in kubectl and flux get all, you don't need this. But if your team includes people who break out in hives when they see a terminal, the web interface is actually useful.

It shows you what Flux is doing behind the scenes - which HelmReleases are stuck, which Kustomizations are failing, and why your deployment has been "Progressing" for the last 45 minutes. The UI also lets you trigger reconciliation manually, which beats the hell out of running flux reconcile commands all day.

The Architecture Reality Check

Under the hood, you're getting standard Flux v2 controllers: Source Controller, Kustomize Controller, Helm Controller, and Notification Controller. Weave GitOps adds a web dashboard and some CRDs for multi-cluster management.

The "simple three-component architecture" they love to tout breaks down to:

• Flux controllers doing the actual work (this is the important part)
• Weave GitOps dashboard showing you pretty pictures of what's happening
• CLI tool that's basically a wrapper around flux and kubectl

Don't let anyone tell you this is revolutionary. It's a decent UI for an existing tool.

Why It Still Matters (Despite the Company Dying)

The Flux integration is solid because it's literally just Flux. You're not betting on some proprietary GitOps engine - you're using the CNCF graduated project that's not going anywhere. If Weave GitOps completely dies tomorrow, you can rip out the UI and keep using Flux directly.

The real value is for teams who need GitOps but don't want to live in YAML hell. If your developers are more comfortable clicking buttons than debugging flux describe, this makes their lives easier. Just don't expect the polish of a tool backed by a living company.

But how does it stack up against the alternatives? Let's look at the brutal reality of debugging these tools when they break at 3am.

Let me cut through the marketing and tell you what installing and running Weave GitOps is actually like. Spoiler alert: it's mostly fine until it isn't.

The "Simple" Installation (That's Not Always Simple)

The installation docs make it look trivial:

## This will work 80% of the time
curl -L "https://github.com/weaveworks/weave-gitops/releases/download/v0.39.0-rc.2/gitops-$(uname)-$(uname -m).tar.gz" | tar xz -C /tmp
sudo mv /tmp/gitops /usr/local/bin

## This is where things get interesting
gitops create dashboard ww-gitops \
  --password=admin123 \
  --export > ./clusters/my-cluster/weave-gitops-dashboard.yaml

What they don't tell you:

• The bootstrap command fails if you have network policies enabled (learned this the hard way at 2am)
• If you're on Kubernetes 1.20 or older, prepare for CRD compatibility issues
• The CLI binary sometimes has permission issues on macOS Monterey+
• Default password requirements will piss off your security team

Pro tip: Run `flux check --pre` first. If Flux prerequisites aren't met, Weave GitOps will install but randomly break later.

Resource Requirements Are Complete Bullshit

The docs claim "200MB of memory minimum." That's technically true for a fresh installation with zero applications. Here's the reality:

• Fresh install: ~200MB (accurate)
• 10 applications: ~400MB
• 50+ applications with Helm charts: 800MB-1.2GB
• Multi-cluster setup: Add another 200-300MB per cluster

I've seen production installations hit 2GB+ of memory usage. Plan accordingly.

Flux Integration: The Good and The Ugly

The Good: Weave GitOps is literally just Flux with a web UI. If you understand Flux concepts, you understand what's happening under the hood. The reconciliation logic is solid because it's battle-tested Flux v2.

The Ugly: When things break, you're debugging Flux, not Weave GitOps. The pretty UI doesn't help when your HelmRelease is stuck because of a malformed values.yaml file. You're back to kubectl describe helmrelease and hoping the error message makes sense.

Multi-Cluster Management (AKA Pain Amplification)

Multi-cluster support works through Cluster API, which sounds great until you realize you now need to understand:

• Flux reconciliation
• Weave GitOps UI quirks
• Cluster API controllers
• Whatever cloud provider bullshit breaks this week

Each additional cluster is another point of failure. The UI tries to show everything in one place, but when cluster connectivity breaks, you get cryptic "connection failed" messages with zero debugging information.

What Actually Breaks in Production

Based on real experience running this in multiple environments:

1. Network policies: Will block the dashboard from reaching Flux controllers
2. RBAC: Default service account permissions are often insufficient for real workloads
3. Ingress conflicts: The dashboard service can conflict with existing ingress controllers
4. Flux version mismatches: Weave GitOps doesn't support Kubernetes < 1.31.1 as of v0.39.0
5. Memory pressure: OOM kills happen more often than the docs suggest

Integration Reality Check

The integration list looks impressive until you try to use it:

• Monitoring: Prometheus integration works but metrics are basic
• Security: SOPS works great, External Secrets Operator integration is solid
• Policy: OPA/Kyverno integration exists but error reporting is terrible
• CI Systems: Works with anything that can commit to Git (so, everything)

Performance: It's Actually Pretty Good

When it's working, performance is solid because you're getting Flux's reconciliation engine. Sync times are typically 30-60 seconds, which is reasonable for most use cases.

The web UI can get sluggish with 100+ applications, but that's a JavaScript problem, not a GitOps problem. The actual deployment performance is excellent.

The Bottom Line

Weave GitOps is a decent UI for Flux. If your team needs visual feedback and button-clicking instead of CLI commands, it solves that problem. Just don't expect enterprise-grade polish from a dead company's open source project.

Budget extra time for troubleshooting installation issues, especially in environments with security policies. And remember: when shit breaks, you're debugging Flux, not Weave GitOps.

Still have questions? Here are the real answers to the questions everyone asks but nobody wants to admit.