> We had to ask ourselves the same questions our customers were asking: “What makes us different [from Kubernetes] ?”
> We quickly realized our greatest value was not necessarily at the orchestration layer, but rather it was the intuitive multicloud control plane we were building (Containership Cloud). Though difficult, we made the choice to abandon our work on open source containership, and pivot to delivering customers the same sort of experience using Kubernetes.
[...]
> It has been nearly a year and a half since the Containership Cloud replatform, and we have failed to monetize Containership Cloud in such a way that we could build a sustainable business.
I can assume why, but it seems very intense to say that all cloud operations will stop a month from now. Since they weren't making money, I would assume they don't have a ton of users, but still. Just over a month to migrate off? That seems pretty wild.
This is also one of the reasons these types of businesses are hard: I don't want to build on a platform that might suddenly set me into fire drill mode where I have to basically stop all work and port to a different technology. Going with a startup is always risky.
You can keep your cluster after they are gone if you were already using eks, gke, or aks. Then just import that cluster into another multi cluster manager.
You can deploy your apps to any existing Kubernetes Cluster or build and manage a new cluster on any cloud with https://www.cloud66.com/(Disclaimer: I work at Cloud 66)
Failing is really the default for startups. A better question would be, why do you think you did not succeed. I'm guessing they simply did not make enough money, which is the norm.
EDIT: if you read the article, they "failed to monetize" so there's your answer. Because they failed to monetize, it's hard to know what they could have done differently to monetize.
Seems like a death spiral to me: they increase enough to be profitable with the current userbase, then half their clients move out due to the increased prices, they have to increase again, etc.
Plenty of people don't pay me money _all of the time._ Most of them aren't even making a decision to do this, it just never would occur to them to pay me money.
