SysAdmin is a title worn proudly at Opscode… because SysAdmins are awesome. Today, July 29th 2011, is officially SysAdmin Appreciation Day, and fellow SysAdmins… thank you for all the work that you do.

Earlier this morning at OSCON, our friends at Dell launched an exciting new offering, the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution.  Dell’s new offering includes a reference architecture based on Dell PowerEdge C Series servers and incorporates the Crowbar software framework (with Chef built in!) for the deployment and management of OpenStack clouds.

If you’re in Los Angeles on Saturday August 6, Cloudtrainings.com will be offering Quick Start Cloud Automation with Amazon EC2 and Opscode Chef.

The main Opscode apt repository has been updated with packages for Debian and Ubuntu for the Opscode Chef release versions 0.10.2 and 0.9.18. Installation instructions are in the usual place on the wiki. Remember that we keep the 0.9 and 0.10 branches separate in the repository: For Chef 0.10.

George Watkins, Jeff Browning and some of our other neighbors on the F5 team have been doing some exciting work with using Chef to configure Local Traffic Manager (LTM) products via the iControl API.

A few weeks ago I was invited to appear on Mike Adams’ “On The Money”, a business radio show on KKNW 1150.  It was a fun conversation.  A transcript of my segment is below: Mike Adams: Welcome back to “On the Money.” You’re listening to Mike Adams of Adams Financial Concepts.

At Opscode, we often talk about the benefits that result from building a ‘fully automated infrastructure’. When systems engineers and developers combine datacenter-level APIs to provision new servers with configuration management tools like Chef to make those new servers do useful things, the results are often amazing.

Chef 0.10.2 and 0.9.18 have been released on RubyGems. This is a critical security update to Chef Server and it is recommended that all open-source Chef Server users upgrade as soon as possible. Users of Opscode’s Hosted Chef and Private Chef are not affected. For those unable to upgrade the patch is available on GitHub.

The 2011 Velocity Conference has begun!  Opscode’s presence began with a great Chef presentation by Christopher Brown, Joshua Timberman, Matt Ray, Aaron Peterson and Seth Chisamore.  If you are attending Velocity, make sure to stop by Opscode’s booth (#505/507) to say hello and pick up Opscode’s new Rule The Cloud stickers and T-shirt.