We’re back at it again! Today we announced our second annual #ChefConf, taking place April 24-26, 2013, in San Francisco at the Hyatt Embarcadero (a pretty cool hotel, btw).

We have released Test Kitchen version 0.7.0. This release brings some important new features and improvements we’d like to tell you about in more detail. OpenStack Runner The first new feature is an Openstack runner. We have an OpenStack build cluster for our Jenkins jobs, and we’ve started adding cookbook’s in test kitchen to Jenkins.

If you are interested in ways to drive faster cloud changes seamlessly, you should attend our webinar next week with Arista Networks to explore how data center infrastructure change is improved with EOS extensibility to Chef.

Companies that adopt Chef across their full stack, from “bare metal” through application deployment, sometimes feel pretty darn powerful. Chef is fantastic at taking your desired infrastructure outcomes and making them happen– scale with little effort, build and rebuild infrastructure, create dev/test/prod environments etc. But how do you decide what those desired outcomes are?

Over and over again, we encounter Chef users working within Amazon EC2 environments. The proliferation of AWS continues to grow six years into its existence with no signs of slowing. Not to mention increasing competition from Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and many others. But how did AWS begin?

Finding yourself in London this December? Join our CTO, Christopher Brown, at TechMesh December 4th through 6th. Christopher will be giving a talk on the use of Erlang in Webmachine for maximizing memory usage and concurrency on the server. For more information about Christopher’s presentation click here.

More customer goodness today: Our friends at Message Bus, pioneers in cloud-based infrastructure for email, mobile and social messaging, are using Opscode Hosted Chef™ to automate configuration, environment and application management across the multiple cloud IaaS providers powering the company’s innovative service. What is Message Bus’s service exactly?

Last month at the Electric Cloud user summit, Opscode and Electric Cloud jointly demonstrated an integration between Chef and Electric Deploy. One month later, we have been very pleased with the initial feedback and are ready to publicly showcase the fruits of our labors.

Introducing docs.opscode.com! We have created a new documentation website, which will become the new home for all of the documentation about Chef. The initial effort has focused around migrating the most accessed and valuable sections first.