The dog days of summer are upon us making it a great time to stay inside with the air-conditioning to focus on developing your IT automation and DevOps skills.

Velocity increasingly drives the modern IT landscape. The convenience of being able to control nearly every aspect of our lives from the phones in our pockets brings with it an expectation that the companies and services we patronize and depend on evolve to meet our needs at breakneck speed.

For the past several months we have been working hard to provide full feature parity accross all Habitat components on Windows. We often use an ASP.NET Core plan to test Windows functionality because building and running a .

With the changes in EU regulation that GDPR introduces, specifically relating to how the personal data of EU citizens must be handled, organisations are facing fresh challenges in how they prove compliance. GDPR brings particular burdens with the ‘Privacy by Design’ mandate that requires data privacy is part of the system design process from day one.

Verisk Analytics is a leading data analytics organization and a Chef customer. Eric Schneider, Verisk’s CTO, currently has his team focused on executing a cloud migration strategy and modernizing legacy applications. Eric recently sat down with us to discuss how Chef is helping them execute on those objectives, and how Verisk’s implementation has evolved over time.

Something we often talk about in the arena of DevOps is the need for cultural or organizational change. One thing that’s often missing from the conversation is the virtuous cycle that tends to occur between People, Process, and Technology.

Habitat’s Studio now supports artifact caching across Studios! This change adds a new capability to the Studio software which allows the downloaded Habitat artifacts (i.e. *.hart files) to be shared between different Studio instances or the between setup and tear downs of the same Studio instance.

Editor’s Note: Torsten Volk of Enterprise Management Associates recently published Ten Priorities for Hybrid Cloud, Containers, and DevOps in 2017. This research report and decision guide is for any enterprise that is adopting DevOps, hybrid cloud, or containers. We’ve asked Torsten to give some additional insights into successful container adoption based on his research.

Cloud Technology Partners is a Chef Professional Services Partner with expertise in regulatory compliance for cloud. They have been an amazing partner for Chef, working with our shared customers to ensure they are successful in executing on their respective goals.