Startup Opscode raises $2.5M funding led by Draper Fisher

A new Seattle startup called Opscode has raised $2.5 million in funding and is developing a service to automate the management of so-called “cloud computing” services. Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, led the funding. Bill Bryant, Draper’s Seattle-based venture partner, also made a personal investment in Opscode, as did the company’s law firm, Perkins Coie LLP.

Many startups use cloud computing services from companies such as Amazon.com, tapping computing power from remote servers via the web. Opscode is working on a product that automates management of cloud computing services in various ways — making them work with a company’s software and scaling them as needed.

This automation eliminates the tedious and time-consuming process of managing cloud services by “typing in a bunch of commands by hand,” said Opscode CEO Jesse Robbins.

Adding and scaling up cloud services quickly can be critical for companies that get sudden media exposure, Robbins said. He pointed to the example of Twitter, the microblogging service, which recently saw a huge traffic surge following a demo on Oprah Winfrey’s TV talk show.

Opscode has already released a free, open-source software tool called Chef that provides some of these automated functions, and plans to introduce paid services that work with Chef later this year.

Opscode is not alone in this area of infrastructure automation. Companies like RightScale, Scalr, Reductive Labs, ControlTier, Engine Yard and Elastra are developing services to help companies manage their use of cloud computing services.

Opscode CEO Jesse Robbins declined to get into specifics on the company’s future paid services, but said but the open-source Chef platform has a rapidly growing community of contributors and adopters.

He said Chef is already being used by Engine Yard, which helps companies using the open-source “Ruby on Rails” internet application framework; 37signals, a internet application company (a partner there created Ruby on Rails); and Wikia, a web hosting service for wikis, started by Jimmy Wales, best known for his founding role in Wikipedia (Interestingly, Amazon.com is an investor in Engine Yard and Wikia, and Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is a personal investor in 37signals).

Robbins is himself a veteran of Amazon.com, where he was responsible for ensuring that the online retailer’s web sites were available at all times (his business card read “Master of Disaster”). Christopher Brown, Opscode’s vice president of engineering, was formerly a lead developer on the Amazon’s core cloud computing service, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

That Amazon pedigree was clearly a draw for Bryant of Draper Fisher.

“The founding Opscode team is comprised of experts who have built and operated some of the Web’s largest sites and supporting infrastructure services, such as Amazon EC2,” he said in a statement.

Opscode grew out of a local technology consulting group, HJK Solutions. HJK’s principals Adam Jacob, Barry Steinglass, and Nathan Haneysmith are all founders of Opscode, along with Robbins.

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