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.

Technical conferences are a great way to get energized about doing awesome things! You participate in inspiring sessions, see some amazing work being done at other companies, and meet with members of your tribe. At the end of the conference you’re ready to get down to business and ship some code!

This morning, we added a new team member to the Opscode family, Barry Crist, our new Vice President, Enterprise. Barry was previously CEO of Likewise, a company with a strong open source to enterprise go-to-market model that had wide industry reach including OEM agreements with VMware, Dell, HP, Riverbed, and EMC.