This is the third post in our series, Why Habitat? You can catch up with Part 1 and Part 2. In our previous posts, we talked about packaging your applications and compared results between packaging using a Dockerfile vs using Habitat. The core of Habitat packaging is the plan.

You can test your custom Ohai plugins with ChefSpec using the chefspec-ohai gem, and with InSpec in Test Kitchen. This frees you from the traditionally difficult task of debugging a failing Ohai plugin. In this post, I’ll focus solely on testing an Ohai plugin.

DevOpsDays Sydney was a great two-day event in downtown Sydney, Australia December 1st and 2nd. If you haven’t been to a DevOpsDay event in your area, you owe it to yourself to check it out. The “un-conference” format of opening keynotes with open spaces for attendee-driven conversations makes each one unique.

On November 22, 2016, I presented a webinar with Seth Vargo on managing secrets with Chef and HashiCorp’s Vault. Our very large and highly engaged audience came prepared with great questions. We started off talking about generic secrets, and why you should start rotating them.

The Event In its fourth year, Chef was again sponsoring DevOpsDays Berlin. The event was held in the cosy Kalkscheune in Berlin-Mitte, giving at a quite homey atmosphere. Chef had a strong presence as a platinum sponsor and with presenters like Nathen Harvey and Eric Maxwell.

Last week at re:Invent, Amazon Web Services CTO, Werner Vogels unveiled AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate during his keynote. We here at Chef are super excited and the initial reception has been amazing! Previously, I covered what’s inside the new offering from a technical perspective.

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.