We’ve made several big announcements this morning… slightly ahead of schedule. You can read details on TechCrunch, GeekWire, DataCenterKnowledge, GigaOM, and more on Techmeme. We just raised $19,500,000! We’ve just closed $19.5M in Series C Funding, led by John Connors at Ignition Partners, along with Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Technology Visionaries from Ancestry.

The next release of Ohai is upon us and includes the new platform_family attribute as well as Oracle Linux support. Cookbook authors are often writing cookbooks that support both Debian based Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and Redhat based Linux distributions, such as CentOS.

Most everybody likes to win and, here at Opscode, we’re no different. That’s why we’re excited about some recent accolades we received – so much so we wanted to share the good news. First, the AlwaysOn OnDemand 100 recognized Opscode as a private company changing the game in IT.

Opscode’s cookbooks are no longer maintained in the monolithic “opscode/cookbooks” repository on GitHub, and are now split up into a new organization on GitHub, “opscode-cookbooks”. Why the Change?

Opscode loves Erlang and we’re not afraid to show it! Myself and several Opscode engineers will be attending Erlang Factory to talk about Erlang, distributed systems, web programming, and just hang out with the generally awesome Erlang community.

We are excited to announce the availability of the new Opscode Knife plugin for HP Cloud Services. This plugin gives knife the ability to create, bootstrap and manage instances in HP Cloud Services Compute, currently in beta.

In July, 2010, we announced Opscode Open Training, providing free availability to open source Chef training materials under a Creative Commons Share-alike license. To date, more than a thousand people have signed up for the materials. We have conducted several classes, both public and private.

Slides Video & the “Automate All the Things!” from Jesse Robbins’ Cloud Connect Keynote.