Opscode Gets $2.5M to Automate the Cloud

Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure company led by veterans of the data center teams from Amazon and Microsoft, has closed a Series A funding round of $2.5 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the company said today. Opscode is developing technology for building and managing automated infrastructures based on community best practices. The company plans to use the funds to hire additional staff as it prepares to launch its core service later this year.

Opscode has already released Chef, an open source systems integration framework for managing large-scale server and application deployments. Chef is already in production use at companies including Engine Yard, 37Signals, and Wikia.

"Opscode is defining essential automation solutions that companies need to take full advantage of cloud computing and virtualization technologies," said Bill Bryant, Venture Partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Opscode board member. "The founding Opscode team is comprised of experts who have built and operated some of the Web’s largest sites and supporting infrastructure services, such as Amazon EC2. Companies that embrace infrastructure automation will gain a significant advantage over those that manage these processes by hand."

Opscode was founded by CEO Jesse Robbins and chief technology officer Adam Jacob. Robbins is an Amazon alum who co-chairs the Velocity Web Performance and Operations conference and is a regular contributor to the O’Reilly Radar blog. Jacob has held senior technical positions with infrastructure automation consultancy HJK Solutions, Marchex, and InfoSpace.

Also on the Opscode team is Vice President of Engineering Christopher Brown, who was most recently Director of Engineering for Global Foundation Services at Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, Chris was the Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2") platform.

"Opscode’s mission is to bring infrastructure automation to the masses," said Robbins. "Our team is uniquely experienced, having built and operated some of the biggest websites and services that people use and rely on every day. With the financial and strategic support of our investors, we are positioned to fulfill that mission."