This week our friends at IBM are hosting their InterConnect 2015 conference and we’re pleased to announce expanding (and existing) support for a wide variety of their products. IBM is synonymous with the Enterprise and they have embraced Chef in a big way.

New Agreement Empowers Enterprises to Automate Workloads Across On-Premises Data Centers and Microsoft Azure to Become Fast, Efficient, and Innovative Software-Driven Organizations SEATTLE – Feb 23, 2015 – Today it was announced that Chef and Microsoft Azure have joined forces to provide global enterprises with the automation platform and DevOps practices that increase business velocity […]

Today we released Chef Server 12.0.4. This release includes cookbook caching, continued development of the key rotation feature, and some LDAP improvements. ## Cookbook Caching Cookbook caching lets you serve up cookbook resources to Chef clients faster by keeping those resources cached by more efficient servers.

If you’re configuring cookbook s3 URL TTL in your `chef-server.rb` configuration file (`opscode_erchef[‘s3_url_ttl’]`), then you’ve been creating cookbook URLs that expire that many (28800 by default) seconds from “now” (i.e. the time of the request), which is great for Chef Client runs, but it’s terrible for caching!

Apologies for the new Warn SPAM Chef 12.1.

This is the third entry in our ongoing, bi-weekly series examining our customer Standard Bank’s DevOps journey. You can read the first entry here, the second post here, and continue below for part three.

Continuing our ongoing blog series highlighting all the fantastic talks, workshops, and sponsors at ChefConf 2015, today we’re focusing on our friend John Byrne from Scholastic and his talk, “Scholastic’s Tech Transformation: Taking Servers from Pets to Cattle, Now with More Containers”.

Background In Chef 12 the old Chef::Platform hashmap located in `lib/chef/platform/provider_mapping.rb` has been deprecated. In its place is a dynamic provider and resolver resolution mechanism which is preferred and which can be manipulated via DSL methods on the resource and provider.

This post originally appeared on jtimberman’s Code Blog. This quick tip is brought to you by my preparation for my ChefConf talk about using Chef Provisioning to build a Chef Server Cluster, which is based on my blog post about the same.