Opscode Cooks Up New Cloud Platform, Wrangles $11 Milliion In Funding
Additionally, Seattle-based Opscode revealed that it has raised $11 million in Series B funding, cash that will be used toward expanding the company's engineering staff, additional research and development and bulking up its sales and marketing efforts. The company has now raised a total of $13.5 million with Battery Ventures leading the most recent funding round.
Opscode makes Chef, an open source systems integration framework for managing and scaling infrastructure, which lets developers manage large-scale server and application deployment by writing code, rather than running commands by hand. Opscore launched Chef in January 2009.
The Opscode Platform leverages Chef, which now has more than 150 individual and 25 corporate contributors including cloud powerhouses like Rackspace, RightScale and VMware's Springsource division, said Opscode CTO Adam Jacob.
"Traditionally, when you think about this space you think about really large configuration management systems," Jacob said, adding that Opscode has built its Internet scale configuration management service from scratch.
Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to automate their infrastructures with re-usable code without the need to build and maintain systems management tools, Jacob said.
"It goes from manual to fully automated architecture," he said. "Our business is running this hosted service."
Essentially, the Opscode Platform is a centrally managed data store into which servers publish data such as IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and more. From there, administrators can use the data to manipulate the entire infrastructure with search-based automation, meaning all data collected by the Platform is indexed and searchable, letting users query from Chef recipes to configure servers and software; role-based access control, which enables administrators to manage the level of infrastructure access for employees and others; and portability, meaning the data stored on the platform is served as a virtual blueprint of the infrastructure and can be used to create clones of a production environment.
Jacob said the Opscode Platform is in a free beta for the next 60 days. After that users can manage up to 20 notes on Opscode Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node.
According to Jacob, Opscode is still hashing out its full go-to-market strategy, which will be through Chef technology partners as well as consultants and solution providers.