Opscode Unveils Commercial Platform
Opscode Platform Puts Advanced Infrastructure Automation
Within Reach for Organizations of all Sizes.
SEATTLE, Wash – June 21, 2010 – Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced the limited beta release of the Opscode Platform, the world’s first hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform makes the popular open-source configuration management tool Chef even more powerful and easy to use.
“Automated infrastructure management represents one of the most complex and urgent problems in IT,” said Rachel Chalmers, industry analyst at The 451 Group. “The launch of the Opscode Platform has the promise to become a watershed moment for web infrastructure. It’s the salesforce.com of configuration management.”
With the advent of cloud computing and virtualization, it is easier than ever to create new servers on demand. Very quickly, a bottleneck has developed around the configuration management layer, where files are written and packages are installed as new server infrastructure is built and maintained. Chef and the Opscode Platform allow developers and systems engineers to fully automate their infrastructures with re-usable code, and without having to build or maintain systems management tools.
“Opscode Chef is a boon for developers and systems engineers that crave automation and sane infrastructure. At Etsy, we use Opscode Chef to build, deploy and maintain server infrastructure in an incredibly agile, yet predictable fashion,” said John Allspaw, VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. “It’s indispensable for both our development and operations teams.”
The launch of the Opscode Platform comes on the heels of tremendous investor, customer and developer validation:
- Investment: Opscode recently announced $11M in Series B funding from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
- Chef Adoption: The growing list of companies that build and configure server infrastructure with Opscode Chef now includes 37Signals, Betfair, Etsy, GoTime, IGN Entertainment, MaxMedia, Scribd, Sonian, Wikia, White Pages and many others.
- Community Growth: To date, more than 150 individual and corporate contributors have signed on to contribute to the Chef project, including, Rackspace, RightScale and the Springsource division of VMware.
“We are excited about the open source contributions the Springsource Division of VMware has made to Opscode Chef.” said Javier Soltero, CTO of Springsource Management Products at VMware. “Chef is an important tool for automating infrastructure management and we look forward to its continued growth and success.”
Following the public launch, Opscode will continue to focus on growing its partner ecosystem to bring the benefits of Chef to an even wider audience. “At Rackspace, we see more and more demand across our customer base for the type of automation that Opscode provides,” said Mark Collier, VP of Business Development at Rackspace. “We are excited to work with Opscode to help our joint customers receive the full promise of cloud computing.”
The Opscode Platform: The Way to a Smarter Infrastructure
At its heart, 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. Administrators can use this data to manipulate entire infrastructures with:
- Search-based Automation: All the data collected by the Opscode platform is indexed and searchable. Users can dynamically query this data from within Chef recipes to configure servers & software.
- Role-based Access Control: Underlying the Opscode Platform is a fine-grained access control system enabling administrators to centrally manage the level of infrastructure access granted to employees, contractors, and other parties.
- Portability: The data stored on the Opscode Platform serves as a virtual blueprint of a given infrastructure, making it much easier to create perfect clones of a production environment.
Pricing and Availability:
The Opscode Platform is in a free beta release for the next 60 days. After the trial period, participants can manage up to 20 nodes on the Platform for $50 per month and $5 per month for each additional node. For more details on pricing and availability, visit www.opscode.com/signupfaq.
About Opscode
Opscode provides world-class infrastructure automation for servers, datacenters, desktops, & the cloud. Opscode makes Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations to manage and scale infrastructure. Founded in 2008, Opscode’s management team includes experts responsible for creating and operating some of the world’s largest websites and cloud computing platforms. The company is privately held and headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.
Press Contact:
Robert Nachbar, Kismet Communications, 206-427-0389, rob@kismetcommunications.net
