This is a guest post from Awesome Chef Jessica DeVita, who is also a technical evangelist at Microsoft. On May 1st, nearly 50 students and faculty gathered at Cal Poly Pomona for a cloud computing workshop to mark the beginning of the student-run data center project sponsored by the Mitchell C.

Robert Pirsig’s seminal 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, teaches us that quality is an attribute that is inherent to a work product. It is not possible to take something that has low quality and add quality later.

I have been working with the audit mode feature introduced in Chef version 12.1.0 – previously announced was the audit-cis cookbook. Audit mode allows users to write custom rules (controls) in Chef recipes using new DSL helpers.

Greetings! Just a quick note here – we released ChefDK 0.5.1 which contains a fix for the `chef diff` command raising an `undefined_method` error. It also updates the embedded Chef from version 12.2.1 to 12.3.0. This fixes the issue I highlighted in the 0.5.0 release blog post where OSX users should not use Chef 12.2.

As many of you know, we’ve been working extensively with the Microsoft team across Windows Server, Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio, and overall go-to-market efforts. Our collaboration continues this week at Microsoft’s BUILD conference in San Francisco, where we’re showcasing our work with the Microsoft team on their new Nano Server.

Ohai Chefs, We’ve just released Chef 11.18.12. This release updates OpenSSL to 1.0.1m, solving the issues listed in the recent security announcement. ## Wait… You skipped 11.18.8 and 11.18.10 I found minor issues with both of these releases (failing Windows tests, incorrect gem version). Sorry for any confusion. ## How to get it?

Manage 1.12.0 is now available from the Chef download site. This release changes the Manage session store from using cookies to using redis. This change addresses sessions not being invalidated immediately on a user’s password reset. Upon upgrading to Manage 1.12.

Greetings! We have released ChefDK 0.5.0.  It can be downloaded for all supported systems at https://downloads.chef.io/chef-dk/ The full list of changes is available in the changelog, but I wanted to highlight some noteable changes below: Policyfiles Native API Mode This release adds a lot of support for the Policyfile workflow.

Update: The dates for ChefConf 2016 have been updated in this post. Update 2: ChefConf 2016 Registration and Call for Proposals are now open. On the heels of our most awesome ChefConf yet, we’re incredibly excited to announce ChefConf 2016, coming to Austin, TX, July 11-13, 2016!