It’s more than a trend at this point. Another cloud-focused company, this time Portland-based Puppet, is opening an engineering office in Seattle.
Puppet plans to open an office in July that will grow to 20 to 30 engineers over the next year or so as the company ramps up hiring in Seattle, said Omri Gazitt, the company’s chief product officer and Seattle-area resident.
The company made the announcement as part of a larger expansion to Singapore and Sydney, Australia, but the Seattle office will probably rival the company’s Belfast office in terms of the number of engineers it employs outside of its main headquarters in Portland, where around 100 engineers work. Puppet has raised $85.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase, and employs a total of around 500 people.
“Portland is awesome, it’s always going to be our home. But as we start doing things in cloud and containers, a lot of the platform-level talent lives in Seattle,” Gazitt said.
Gazitt, an ex-Microsoft engineer, said Seattle is “certainly number one in cloud” when it comes to the concentration of talent working in the field. “Our product thrusts are deeply focused on the world of cloud and containers going forward, (and) that has everything to do with how we think about location strategy,” he said.
Chef, perhaps Puppet’s great rival in the burgeoning field known as DevOps, is headquartered in Seattle, which sets up an interesting battle for talent over the next few years. A lot of Bay Area companies have opened up offices in Seattle after tiring of the talent wars in California, but as more and more companies center engineering teams in Washington, those talent skirmishes might shift north.
Puppet, which makes cloud-native software development tools for companies looking to ease their transition to the cloud, also announced several new updates to its core products, including Puppet 2017.2.
The new release is “the most fully featured release we’ve had in a year,” Gazitt said. It adds a new focus on discovery, after Puppet realized that its customers needed more help discovering resources that weren’t under management as opposed to managing the resources they already controlled. Rogue IT strikes again.
The company also announced Lumogon, a new service for operations folks to get a better picture of the containers running across their network.
