Portland-based DevOps startup Puppet has laid off three percent of its workforce, around 20 people, as it gears up for a new push amid an ever-changing market for software development tools.
The layoffs, first reported by The Oregonian, were confirmed by a Puppet representative. “As we enter into the next growth phase, we are ensuring our investments are focused on our most strategic priorities. We are confident that this realignment of our workforce will allow us to innovate more rapidly on behalf of our customers,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Over the last few years, Puppet rode a wave of interest in tools that helped companies build and deploy software much faster than traditional approaches allowed. But changing trends in application deployment appear to have taken some of the wind out of the company’s sails; at one point it seemed like Puppet was headed toward an IPO, but talk of that has cooled.
Companies that once relied on Puppet’s flagship tools are now investing in newer approaches such as containers and even serverless development. At Kubecon 2017, Pinterest — one of the largest web operations on the planet — detailed how it overhauled its infrastructure to focus on containers and Kubernetes, specifically calling out its desire to replace Puppet tools with containerized approaches.
These type of migrations are measured in years, not months, so the situation isn’t necessarily dire, but Puppet appears to be changing its strategy. The company has raised $104.5 million in equity and debt financing to date, according to Crunchbase.
