The AGILE 2013 conference descends on grand ol’ Nashville next week and of course your friends from Opscode will be there in force, from an exhibition booth to our awesome consultant and “lnxchk” Mandi Walls speaking on  (what else?

What Happened? A vulnerability in the third-party software that runs our Open Source Chef wiki and ticketing system was exploited to gain access to that particular system. While on this system, the attacker gained escalated privileges and downloaded the user database for the wiki and ticketing system. What information was exposed?

Given we were founded and are headquartered in Seattle, it was exciting to see the Atlantic ranked Seattle as our nation’s leading high-tech mecca (last year).

We’ve got a bundle of exciting Chef news for you today. * Chef 11.6.0 release * Ohai 6.18.0 release * Client release cadence * Testing matrices Chef 11.6.0 Opscode is excited to announce the release of version 11.6.0 of the Chef client. You can download the installation packages from the install page now.

This is not only a cool panel topic, but also a rad group of people to have all discussing DevOps and Continuous Delivery (in the cloud) at one time. Last week, Redmonk analyst James Governor hosted the latest addition to the IBM PureSystems video chat series on opinionated infrastructure.

Thus far this week has seen a few interesting pieces across the IT and business media landscape. First up, Charles Babcock at InformationWeek argues that theorizing the big vendors will eventually own the cloud is premature. He provides some interesting point-counterpoint from himself and other media colleagues here.

Coming off Independence Day, this week has seen an active news cycle in tech, led by Microsoft announcing a significant reorganization of the software giant around “One Microsoft”. All Things D takes a look at what it all means here, while InformationWeek takes a bigger picture look here.

You’ve heard our founder Adam Jacob talk about it before – software is increasingly becoming the delivery platform for goods and services in today’s economy. So, it only makes sense that companies would want to leverage SaaS to extend customer service capabilities, shorten customer feedback loops, and provide a better overall customer experience.

I’m very happy and quite proud to announce the successful deployment of erchef on Hosted Chef this week. Getting erchef into Hosted Chef has been a long and challenging project involving a good chunk of Opscode’s engineers.