July 14, 2023

Is Netlify killing Jamstack?

The Netlify CEO made an announcement to the Netlify team. He did not say it with so many words, but they fired 25% of their employees over a strategy change. They changed from being developer oriented to being enterprise oriented. My big hero Kyle Mathews also got fired, so I asked him about it…

Joost: Hey Kyle, they ‘bought’ Gatsby and fired you? Or am I missing something here?

Kyle: They bought us mostly for the Gatsby data layer which we’ve been spinning out into a standalone API (so not just within Gatsby but in any framework) — https://www.netlify.com/products/connect/ — I helped a lot when we started on this last year but then a team was rolling with it which they’ve continued to at Netlify. I wasn’t really involved anymore so was happy to step away to leave more room for others.

Joost: Thank you Kyle. I admire your work and wrote about you/have referenced you many times when it comes to moving the Jamstack forward. Netlify is taking it two steps back IMO. Cheap multi-purpose (thus slow) virtual machines on a disposable architecture is everything but ’enterprise’. It screams ‘hobby projects’ and ‘developers’. A high performance dedicated setup, like Gatsby Cloud, is what enterprise customers are looking for (and we both know it). What on earth happened here?

My take is that this is going to shift the perception massively. I expect Jamstack adoption to plummet in the coming years, as Netlify was the driving force behind onboarding new Jamstack developers. I wonder what this is going to mean for the Jamstack community. Did Netlify kill Jamstack or has it matured?

()  Joost van der Schee