A lot of things happened in the last month since the 0.7.4 release! The MVP for this release is a new contributor, Grant Zanetti. Unfortunately we weren't able to secure a picture of Grant in time for the release post, but we imagine he's a handsome devil :-).

Ohai, we have a nice release for you today! Our MVP for Ohai 0.3.2 is James Gartrell, for adding Windows support! He had an itch to scratch, and thanks to his contribution, the whole community benefits! We're excited because this brings us one step closer to also having Chef available for Windows.

John Willis interviews Opscode’s CTO Adam Jacob at Velocity 2009.

Utilizing a mixture of open source tools (such as Chef, Nanite, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ) and battle-tested techniques, Adam and Ezra will show you how to build an infrastructure that’s easy to manage, integrates with your application, and is self-documenting.

We didn't do a blog post for Chef 0.7.2, as it was released in the midst of VelocityConf. And thanks to our observant community, we're releasing Chef 0.7.4 earlier than originally planned to fix a few bugs that crept in. Speaking of community, it's time to honor our MVP.

I was totally impressed with the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop – they clearly have the coolest bundle available. While watching the presentation, I whipped up a Chef Solo tarball that will install their Hadoop distribution for Ubuntu. First, make sure you have Chef installed, and then: chef-solo -r http://chef-solo-hadoop.s3.amazonaws.com/hadoop-cloudera-ubuntu.tar.gz And you are good to go!

Ohai, it’s been awhile! Since the last release was almost four months ago and we've had some new features added and some hairy bugs squashed, we thought a new version of Ohai, our system information gathering tool used with Chef, was in order. The Ohai 0.3.0 MVP is returning Chef 0.5.

Chef 0.7.0 is hot off the presses, and it brings several great new features along with the traditional heap of improvements and bug fixes. This is a big release, and the first since we released Chef back in January that hasn’t been backwards compatible.

One of the 9 Things to Like About Chef is that "it uses Ruby as the configuration language." We talk about that in that blog post, and we mention it on the wiki, but at the time we didn't have many examples.