ClusterHQ
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
ClusterHQ was a container storage startup co-founded by Luke Marsden and led by CEO Mark Davis that pioneered container data management. Its flagship open-source project, Flocker, was built to solve the challenge of stateful storage for containers, letting developers run databases and other stateful applications in containers by making data volumes as portable as the containers themselves.
02 / ClusterHQ FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
SDxCentral (22 Dec 2016) reports ClusterHQ CEO/chairman Mark Davis’s shutdown post: the board shut operations immediately; Davis pointed to the underlying cause that ‘everybody else is talking about stateful containers,’ i.e. the Flocker niche was no longer unique as Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, Portworx and others piled in.
Davis said everybody else was talking about stateful containers; SDxCentral lists Docker Infinit, Kubernetes 1.3, Mesosphere, Portworx, Kontena piling onto the problem.
The article frames ClusterHQ as an early Flocker pioneer whose premise was no longer unique.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
ClusterHQ was founded to build commercial container data management technology.
- Flocker launched
The company launched Flocker 0.1, one of the first tools for managing stateful containers, positioning 'container data management' as essential for containers to reach their full potential.
- Series A
ClusterHQ raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel Partners London, planning to monetize through paid tools and services.
- Shutdown
On December 22, 2016, CEO Mark Davis announced the company was shutting down operations immediately. The board cited 'a confluence of reasons'; Davis said the company had come to market too early and that 'it's often the pioneers who end up with arrows in their backs.' The open-source Flocker code was left behind for the container ecosystem.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Raised $18 million, including a $12 million Series A led by Accel.
- 02
On December 22, 2016 the board voted to cease operations immediately; the code of its open-source project Flocker lives on in the container ecosystem.
- 03
No audited loss figure was publicly disclosed.