We are pleased to announce the initial release of a new Chef repository and Amazon EC2 AMIs that can be used to bootstrap a Chef server and clients in the Cloud! In our experience as systems automation consultants, we built a library of best practices for designing and deploying web application infrastructures.

RailsConf 2009 may be over, but the work continues back at home as people put into practice the tools and concepts they learned about last week. We are excited about the buzz Chef made at the conference.

We had a slight bug sneak in to the 0.6.0 release: new installations were not properly running the chef-client. We’re shipping 0.6.2 right now to fix that bug, rather than in a few weeks. Thanks to Edd Dumbill and our own Joshua Timberman for being on the ball this morning (and helping test the fix.

Hello! How are my favorite cooks? Its been a while since our last release (around twice as long as we prefer, actually,) but we make up for our tardiness with a whole heap of fabulous for you. We begin, as always, with the MVP award. It was a tight race: Chef 0.5.

Opscode will be at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas next week, May 4-7. I will be attending in support of Edd Dumbill's Chef tutorial on Monday at 8:30am. I will also be available afterward, and throughout the conference to answer questions about Chef and using it to deploy Rails applications.

OPSCODE ANNOUNCES $2.5 MILLION IN SERIES A ROUND Draper Fisher Jurvetson Leads Round in Infrastructure Automation Start-up Founded by Former Amazon.com Operations and Cloud Computing Experts SEATTLE, Wash – April 24, 2009 – Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced that it has closed its Series A round of $2.

Log management is an area of operations that is often sorely lacking. For Linux/Unix systems, log management is much easier with a centralized syslog server. Yet many organizations don’t set one up. Oft-cited reasons are that Unix syslog is unreliable, insecure, or difficult to set up properly.

The talk Ezra and I gave at the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco is up on Slideshare. Highlights included our building an ad-hoc cloud via Nanite, laptops quoting Wargames, and more than one mention of Ponies, Unicorns, and Meatclouds.

Opscode will be out in force at Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco. Thursday morning at 10:30am I'll be on a panel discussing Cloud Operations.  Then, Thursday afternoon at 2:40pm, our CTO, Adam Jacob, will be presenting with Ezra Zygmuntowicz on Automated Cloud Infrastructure.  Our CEO, Jesse Robbins, will also be in attendance.