Make a resolution to automate in 2013.  Attend one of our Chef Introductory workshops in a location near you.  Workshop coursework covers: local workstation set up with Chef and connection to a Chef Server. Use Chef to automate installation of a Nagios server as a real world example.

We’ve got a special holiday Chef bug-fix release for you today. Updated packages are in the usual places. First, this release sets a requirement that moneta be below the newly rewritten 0.7.0 version because that versions API changed and currently breaks Chef.

Last week we were fortunate enough to make a guest appearance on Channel 9, the Microsoft Developer Network channel with a fantastic community.

An OpenStack cloud is a journey some of the largest service providers in the world have embarked upon leveraging both Nicira and Opscode Chef. This webinar will explore the journey Nicira took to deploy their internal OpenStack cloud.

We’re back at it again! Today we announced our second annual #ChefConf, taking place April 24-26, 2013, in San Francisco at the Hyatt Embarcadero (a pretty cool hotel, btw).

We have released Test Kitchen version 0.7.0. This release brings some important new features and improvements we’d like to tell you about in more detail. OpenStack Runner The first new feature is an Openstack runner. We have an OpenStack build cluster for our Jenkins jobs, and we’ve started adding cookbook’s in test kitchen to Jenkins.

If you are interested in ways to drive faster cloud changes seamlessly, you should attend our webinar next week with Arista Networks to explore how data center infrastructure change is improved with EOS extensibility to Chef.

Companies that adopt Chef across their full stack, from “bare metal” through application deployment, sometimes feel pretty darn powerful. Chef is fantastic at taking your desired infrastructure outcomes and making them happen– scale with little effort, build and rebuild infrastructure, create dev/test/prod environments etc. But how do you decide what those desired outcomes are?

Over and over again, we encounter Chef users working within Amazon EC2 environments. The proliferation of AWS continues to grow six years into its existence with no signs of slowing. Not to mention increasing competition from Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and many others. But how did AWS begin?