The holiday season is a time often spent with family, friends and… shopping carts. Retail sales over this season are expected to reach a record high of $655.8 billion. And with purchases going through the roof, companies are highly focused — for good reason — on customer experience.

I’m not a developer. I’m an ops — at least I was one. For several years, I’ve been teaching and consulting individuals and companies about DevOps and automation and how to change the way they think about, manage and build infrastructure, using Chef tooling.

I’m pleased to announce two new Chef assets that enable you to assess and remediate your Windows 2012 R2 Servers using the compliance feature of Chef Automate. They are both basic, initial examples, but demonstrate how you can use a compliance profile in conjunction with a cookbook to apply best practice server hardening.

I’d like to announce that Arista is now part of the Chef Partner Cookbook Program. They have certified the EOS Cookbook which manages the configuration of EOS network devices. Arista Networks was founded to pioneer and deliver software-driven cloud networking solutions for large data center storage and computing environments.

“AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate” Brings Full Chef Platform to AWS Customers for Fast and Secure Management of Cloud and On-Premises Infrastructure at Any Scale LAS VEGAS – December 1, 2016 – Today at AWS re:Invent 2016, Chef announced that the full capabilities of Chef’s commercial platform have been integrated into a new managed service […]

We’re excited about this morning’s announcement at AWS re:Invent unveiling the new AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate service. This service helps anyone get started quickly with Chef Automate in a low-risk low-friction way with all the benefits you’d expect from any native AWS service.

I am delighted to have joined over 200 people from all over the world that flocked to Cape Town, South Africa for the first ever DevOpsDays in South Africa! DevOpsDays Cape Town was held at the Doubletree Hotel in the Woodstock neighborhood of Cape Town. The conference opened on November 7th, 2016.

I’m pleased to announce two Chef vRA 7.0+ Blueprints for both Windows and Linux from Chef. They are basic, initial integrations, and have an example that demonstrates how to bootstrap the chef-client into a cataloged virtual machine.

TL;DR: Wow, a 2000 word blog post. Habitat is a better way to package apps, and creates better containers. Walk through the Habitat tutorial here. In part 1 of this blog post series, we talked about how Habitat approaches the problem of Application Packaging.