Opscode Raises $19 Million to Automate the Cloud

Opscode has raised an additional $19.5 million to continue to enhance its cloud infrastructure automation tools and support its growing customer base, the company said early Monday. Ignition Partners was the lead investor in the Series C funding, with follow-on investments from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

"Opscode is experiencing incredible growth and attracting Fortune 500 enterprise customers at an unprecedented rate for a company at our stage," said Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode. "This round of funding will enable us to further advance the innovation curve in cloud infrastructure automation and dramatically expand our market opportunity."

Opscode is the developer of  Chef, an open source framework using repeatable code – organized as “recipes” and “cookbooks” – to automate the configuration and management process for virtual servers, enabling users to quickly deploy servers. Chef has quickly become one of the key tools for configuration management for fast-growing infrastructures.

"Chef is a model for reuse," said Hill. "It's an elegant automation platform that can interate and repeat patterns. Chef is going to solve a growing skills gap in this industry. We think that automation is the answer."

Hill took over the CEO  post last year, succeeding co-founder Jesse Robbins, who shifted to Chief Community Officer. Hill believes the the increasing complexity of cloud infrastructure presents a huge challenge for Internet companies and enterprises - and that Chef is the answer.

"The open source explosion means that there are a lot more solutions out there," he said. "From a management perspective, there's more complexity to manage."

A growing number of users agree. Opscode also announced additional users of its Hosted Chef and Private Chef offerings to deploy new infrastructure and applications, including Ancestry.com, Decide.com, LAN Airlines, Marshall University, SolutionSet, and Stella & Dot.

"Private Chef makes life much easier for our developers and operations staff as they work to build, test and implement new features and applications," said John Esser, director of software process and agile development, Ancestry.com. "Private Chef enables our IT teams to easily deploy new offerings and rapidly scale applications so our subscribers can trace their family roots by accessing the billions of genealogical records and millions of family trees from around the globe."

Opscode also announced new metrics for the growth of the open source Chef community in the past 12 months:

Opscode also offers Hosted Chef,  the first server configuration management offering delivered as a service. Hill said the hosted offering differentiates Oscode from its chief competitors in the space, Puppet Labs and cfEngine.

Meanwhile, the adoption of Private Chef by enterprise users positions the company for revenue growth, according to Hill,who said the new funding will allow Opscode to increase staff from 50 employees to 70 or 80. "In terms of a business model that we can scale, I think we've found it," said Hill.

Oscode previously raised an $11 million Series B round of funding led by Battery Ventures and including existing investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who led Opscode’s Series A funding of $2.5 million.

Opscode also announced the speaker lineup for #ChefConf, Opscode’s inaugural user conference in San Francisco, May 15-17. The conference will feature keynotes from executives from Ancestry.com, Cycle Computing, Digital Science, Fastly, Fidelity, HP Cloud Services, Intuit and Lookout Mobile Security. Data Center Knowledge readers can get a discount by visiting this link and using the code "HPC" while registering.