Chef 0.10 recently hit the release candidate phase of the release process, so I’d like to give you all a preview of the new features in Chef while we’re finalizing the code. The biggest new feature in Chef 0.10 is environment support, so we’ll start there.

Several members of the Opscode team will be at the Bay Area Chef  User Group Meetup on April 26th in Mountain View.  In addition to general Chef Q&A and hacking, we will plan to discuss the newest version of Chef.  Join us and share in the Chef 0.10 knowledge!

Next Wednesday April 27th at 10am PT, Jaspersoft and Full360 will be demonstrating elasticBI, Full360’s powerful and integrated business intelligence suite.  ElasticBI features Jaspersoft’s BI offering running on a Vertica database.  It is delivered on AWS and and built using Chef and the Opscode Platform.

Deb packages for Chef 0.9.16 and Ohai 0.6.2, as well as the necessary dependencies that are not included in the distributions, have been uploaded to the Debian repository on apt.opscode.com. Instructions regarding how to use this repository can be found on the wiki. This update provides packages for the distribution releases listed below.

While we’re full steam ahead on Chef 0.10 here at Opscode, we know that upgrading a critical component of your infrastructure can take time. For that reason, we’re releasing some updates to Chef 0.9 to keep you running smoothly on 0.9 until you can upgrade.

Yesterday’s Ohai release had a critical windows bug that slipped through our beta testing. We’ve released Ohai 0.6.2 with a fix for this issue. Special thanks to Doug MacEachern for finding and patching this issue. Ohai 0.6.2 also contains a fix to set a read timeout when querying EC2’s metadata servers.

It’s been a long time coming, so we are pleased to announce that Ohai 0.6.0 is released, including more than 40 bug fixes and improvements. Before getting into the details, I’d like to congratulate this release’s MVP, Kurt Yoder.

Following the success of our recent Chef Hack Day in Austin, Texas, on Saturday April 30 we will have the first Denver/Boulder area hack day! Opscode will be in attendance with members of the developer and services teams. What: Spend a Saturday hacking on Chef itself, or on your cookbooks.

We will be at the Orange County PHP and Los Angeles PHP Meetups on April 27th and 28th. See below for more info. Aaron Peterson is a long-time Systems Engineer and Administrator who has worked at scale for companies like Amazon.com and BofA.