Announcing the first official Chef cookbook contest! There are a ton of great cookbooks on the Opscode Community Site, but we know there are more out there in various states of completion.

I’m excited to announce Opscode and Chef will be coming to Charlotte, NC on September 14th. Seth Chisamore, Opscode engineer, will be giving an introduction to Chef and demonstrate how to use Chef in a cloud environment at the September meeting of DevOps CLT.

I am pleased to announce that Opscode’s Chef Fundamentals open training materials have been updated to a new version. If you signed up for Open Training in the last month or so, you should have received a link to the updated materials.

Our friends on the Cloud Foundry PaaS team at VMware just announced that Cloud Foundry now works across multiple cloud providers and is fully deployed and configured with Chef!

Opscode is coming to the Bay Area next week for .conf 2011, the 2nd annual Splunk users conference.  We’ve done some exciting work with our friends at Splunk over the last few months and look forward to showing it off. The event runs from Monday the 15th through Wednesday the 17th at the Westin St.

We’re excited to reach another Opscode Chef release, this time with over 85 resolved bugs. The gems are in the usual place. We’re also happy that this time the Debian/Ubuntu packages are available upon release. Head over to the installation page on the community wiki if you’re not familiar with these steps.

Some history… In June of 2008, Adam Jacob, Barry Steinglass, Nathan Haneysmith, and I set out to (as Nathan put it) “Bring Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”.  We were building what we believed could become the central configuration utility for the world’s infrastructure.

Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that the company has named Mitch Hill as Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Jesse Robbins in that role. Robbins will serve as Opscode’s Chief Community Officer and will steward the vibrant community ecosystem around Opscode and Chef™.

sysadminning? more like sysadwinning!