Analyst: Rachel Chalmers

Timed to coincide with the recent Velocity conference on Web performance and operations,

Opscode

has announced a limited beta release of its commercial flagship, the OpscodePlatform. It's a hosted configuration management service designed to make the open sourceconfiguration management tool Chef even more useful. Servers under management canpublish IP addresses, loaded kernel modules, OS versions and other configurationinformation to the Opscode Platform's centrally managed data store. It works like a lighter- weight, offsite configuration management database.Once the servers have published their configuration data to the Opscode Platform,administrators can use it in a variety of ways. The data is indexed and searchable, and itshould be easy to query from within Chef recipes, making it easier to configure new serversand software. Fine-grained, role-based access control gives administrators plenty of latitudeto control how employees, contractors and other users interact with IT infrastructure. Maybemost usefully, though, the Opscode Platform's data is effectively a blueprint for the entireinfrastructure. Administrators can use it to make perfect clones of the productionenvironment.

The 451 take

Every open source company needs some kind of commercial story to tell, and the more venture capital funding it takes in, the more reasons it needs that story. Opscode now hasthirteen and a half million reasons to announce its Opscode Platform, a hosted NoSQL datastore for configuration information with a search interface and very granular role-basedaccess control. It's betting that the many users of open source Chef will pay extra for theease of use and power of this back end.Opscode will celebrate its second birthday in September, and there will be plenty tocelebrate. The company has raised $11m in a series B funding round from

Battery Ventures

and

Draper Fisher Jurvetson

. Draper also led Opscode's $2.5m series A round. As part of this investment, Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, has joined Opscode'sboard of directors. Dhaliwal also sits on the board of

Neocleus

. The company's fundraising success reflects its growing customer traction. Today, Opscodenumbers

37Signals

Betfair

Etsy

IGN Entertainment

and

White Pages

among the usersof its Opscode Chef tool. More and more individual and corporate contributors have signedup to the Chef development effort, including

Rackspace

RightScale

and – an especially strategically significant win – the