ClusterHQ Inc., the startup that developed the popular open-source software container manager Flocker, today said it’s shutting down operations immediately.

The move comes as something of a surprise, since the company had raised $18 million in venture capital funding to propel its vision of stateful container data management technology.

In an interview on SiliconANGLE’s mobile live video unit theCUBE at DockerCon 2016 in June, Sandeepan Banerjee, the company’s senior vice president of engineering and operations, spoke in depth about how its open-source container data volume orchestrator works, and why it was such an important development in the container ecosystem.

Banerjee explained that Flocker was built to overcome one of the biggest challenges faced by developers working with Docker containers in the early days, which was moving an application and all of its components from one server to another. He explained that stateful services in particular were a difficult match for the container model, and that’s what Flocker was designed to solve.

“Normally when you elasticize a workload using containers, if a particular node dies, the workload dies with it,” Banerjee said. “So you have to take care to make sure that the data is protected, that it is persistent … as the workload hops around from machine to machine.”

Flocker solves that problem by enabling developers to manage data volumes and make them as portable as containers themselves, Banerjee said. These days, almost all of the major databases, message queuing services and key-value stores are supported by Flocker, which is able to run on most popular cloud platforms as well.

“To protect [data] requires a lot of operational optimization,” Banerjee noted. “The entire life-cycle of data is a long and complex one. With containers, things are inherently moving around, the compute jumps from machine to machine, and the data has to follow.”

So what was the problem? Unfortunately for ClusterHQ, the premise behind Flocker is no longer unique. In a final blog post, inevitably titled “ClusterF***ed,” ClusterHQ Chief Executive Officer Mark Davis explained that today “everybody is talking about stateful containers,” and bemoaned the fact that pioneers are oftentimes the ones who end up with “arrows in their backs.” Indeed, ClusterHQ’s innovation has outgrown the company itself.

“For a confluence of reasons, the ClusterHQ board of directors, of which I am chairman, have decided it best to immediately shut down company operations,” Davis wrote. “We are proud of many accomplishments, not least of which is leaving behind an outstanding body of open source software which is actively used by many in the container ecosystem.”

Davis failed to mention what will become of Flocker itself. The project is open-source and available to download on GitHub. It has also attracted support from the likes of EMC Corp. so there is hope that someone will decide to pick up the slack, and that Flocker will continue to live on in some form.

You can watch SiliconANGLE’s full interview with ClusterHQ’s Banerjee on theCUBE below: