Opscode raises $2.5M to manage cloud applications

April 24, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Opscode, a company that automates the management of applications in the Internet cloud, has raised $2.5 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Seattle-based Opscode has released an open source system called Chef which it says is already used by Engine Yard, 37Signals, Wikia, and others. With Chef, companies can run their applications on cloud computing platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), then write code to automatically scale applications and resources up and down as needed (rather than manually entering commands). Obviously, Opscode plans to offer products that customers have to pay for too, starting later this year, but it’s not saying much about that yet.

The most intriguing thing so far is who’s involved  — both in terms of the companies mentioned above who already use Chef, and Opscode’s leadership. Chief executive Jesse Robbins’ background includes a stint as Amazon’s “Master of Disaster” who was responsible for ensuring website availability, while Vice President of Engineering Christopher Brown was the lead developer for EC2.

This is Opscode’s first venture round. Other cloud management companies include RightScale and Elastra.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • What Puppet
    Aren't these the guys that forked Puppet and pretend like the wrote all the code. Me thinks, yes.
  • To quote Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs (Puppet's corporate parent):
    > To be clear here, Chef isn't Puppet rebundled or anything; it takes a
    > lot of Puppet's obvious advancements, but it doesn't share any code

    Chef was born out of Opscode's experience building fully automated production infrastructures with a variety of tools. That experience helped us define clear requirements for tool that went far beyond traditional configuration management. After surveying many different Open Source tools, we found that none met our needs and so we created our own.

    You can learn more about why we made Chef at the links below:
    * http://blog.opscode.com/2009/01/9-things-to-lik...
    * http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/FAQ

    Sincerely,
    Jesse Robbins
    CEO & Cofounder, Opscode