Computers have fascinated Jon Cowie since he was little. So much so, that he dreamed of being a developer from an early age after encountering BASIC in old Atari magazines. He pursued this dream all the way through university, where he attained a computer science degree in 2005. Then, something happened.

An early Christmas present for you! We’ve been rethinking how Chef can be used to bootstrap machines and create test environments, and an early prototype–the chef-metal gem–has come out of that thinking. The long explanation is here.

One of our goals here at Chef (née Opscode) is to make installing Chef on a new node as easy as possible so that you can start enjoying the benefits of automation with minimal delay. But what happens to nodes that stick around for extended periods of time?

This post was originally published on SysAdvent. Chef, nee Opscode, has long used Amazon Web Services. In fact, the original iteration of “Hosted Enterprise Chef,” “The Opscode Platform,” was deployed entirely in EC2.

That’s right, you only have two weeks left to get #ChefConf 2014 tix for $850. This super discount ends Dec. 31. So… Register today! Our third annual #ChefConf, goes down April 15-17, at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco.

This post was originally published on SysAdvent. One of the long standing issues with Chef has always been that changes we wanted to make to nodes weren’t necessarily instant.

This morning we announced we’ve changed the company name from Opscode to Chef. Aaaaaaand… the Earth is still spinning. As we circulated the idea of changing our company name amongst employees and some members of the Chef Community (and some total strangers, too) the reactions generally fell into one of four categories: Awesome, makes sense.

This morning we made several exciting announcements. First, we changed our company name to Chef. While the Opscode name served us well, it is time to leave it behind. I like both the simplicity of Chef, as well as the clarity.

Scale Venture Partners Leads Over-Subscribed Round Including Citi Ventures and Follow-On Investments From Battery Ventures, DFJ, and Ignition Partners Company’s Third Quarter Sales Grow 250 Percent Year-Over-Year as Enterprises Adopt Chef to Move at the Speed of Customer Demand SEATTLE – December 9, 2013 – Chef™ (formerly Opscode), IT automation for speed and awesomeness, today […]