We’ve posted a number of blogs detailing the awesome speakers, dynamite sessions, cool events, and more taking place next week at #ChefConf 2013, April 25-26. Apparently, you all have been listening because #ChefConf is nearly sold out!

Are you managing IT infrastructure within a University and looking to add automation? This webinar is for you. Over the last few years, we have seen Chef starting to make waves within the hallowed halls of many fine institutions of higher learning.

Packt Publishing has just released “Instant Chef Starter” by John Ewart, another installment in Packt’s “Instant” series of short topics in programming and system administration. The book is attractively priced at $7.99 for the eBook format. It’s also well edited and a quick read at 70 pages.

Good news this morning, as we announced that Sonian, the pioneer in cloud-powered email archiving and search, has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef™. Sonian is using Hosted Chef to automate configuration, environment and application management across the multiple cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers powering the company’s innovative archive and search service.

Earlier today our friends at Cloudmunch announced the launch of Cloudmunch Devops Platform, an exciting new continuous delivery platform with native integrations to both Github and Hosted Chef.

The Making of Learn Chef What’s the fastest way for a new user to go from zero to ‘converge’? – Bryan Hale A few weeks ago, we launched the #learnchef campaign. #learnchef was designed to improve our content by helping more users successfully converge their first node.

There are many truisms in complex systems. One such truism: incidents happen. We all strive to decrease the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recovery (MTTR). For more than 40 years a system has been used across many industries to organize, manage, and lead people trying to solve problems.

Continuing our series of customer spotlights, today we published a case study on RealSelf, a consumer health and beauty community that helps people make informed decisions on elective cosmetic services. To keep pace with rapid growth of its online community, RealSelf needed a solution capable of automating configuration for its application development pipeline.

In part 1 of this series we focused primarily on the value of leverage and how tools, inside and outside of the context of IT can directly influence the output of the desired function.