AnsibleWorks gets $6M to open source IT automation

AnsibleWorks, whose mission in life is to foster Ansible, an open source way to automate IT, now has $ 6 million in funding. Menlo Ventures led this Series A round which comes five months after the company was founded by a couple Red Hat vets, CEO Said Ziouani and his co-founder Michael DeHaan.

Ansible co-founder Said Ziouani.

The company’s sales pitch is that devops and systems administrators want something more “holistic” than Opscode Chef or Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) configuration management tools to do their jobs. AnsibleWorks says it focuses both on up-front configuration management and the actual deployment itself.

DeHaan, who also spent time at Puppet, started work on Ansible 18 months ago and the company claims to have garnered more than 300,000 users since then, including Aerospike, AppDynamics, Basho Technologies, Care.com and Gawker Media. The first commercial version of the enterprise product, AWX, came online last month and is available free for use on up to 10 nodes.

DisclosurePuppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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