Today, Opscode, the company that sponsors the configuration automation tool Chef, announced that it has closed $19.5 million in series C funding lead by Ignition Partners with follow-on investment from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Ignition Partners’ John Connors has joined the Opscode board.

Opscode, which was one of our open source startups to watch in 2012 has now raised a total of $33 million. Opscode’s primary competitor, Puppet Labs, raised $8.5M in a series C last November. Its total funding is at $15.5 million.

Earlier this month I compared a few metrics to see which tool had more traction: Puppet or Chef. I concluded that although Puppet has more traction, Chef is spreading fast – fast enough to start catching up to Puppet even though Puppet is also growing quickly.

But how much usage the free open source versions have says nothing about either company’s actual revenues. Last year, says Opscode VP of Marketing Jay Wampold, the company’s 2011 revenue was over 10x its 2010 revenue. Puppet Labs’ revenue has also grown quickly, according to Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies.

As big data necessitates more automation in the enterprise, expect Puppet, Chef and other automation tools like CFEngine continue to rise in popularity.