Opscode’s own Matt Ray recently spoke at CME Group‘s 2012 Technology Conference, presenting “Automating Infrastructure and Continuous Deployment with Chef,” to financial services IT pros, developers and architects. Check it out here. It’s a clear, informative overview on how Chef works and what benefits it delivers.

Many of you in our community likely know Splunk, the innovative big data company that enables enterprise companies to collect, analyze and harness the power of their machine data. What you may not know is Splunk now offers a SaaS product designed specifically for the cloud.

In the past year our community has grown to 20,000 registered users who have downloaded Opscode Chef almost 2 million times.  Chef now powers the automation of thousands of organizations which combine to reach nearly a billion people across the globe.

On Friday, October 26th between 1228 and 2046 UTC, Opscode Hosted Chef was in a degraded state with significantly reduced throughput and a high rate of timeout errors for API requests. We deeply regret this inconvenience to our customers, and want to explain the cause of the reduction in performance.

We have deployed a new search API, dubbed /partial search/, to Opscode Hosted Chef. The partial search API is designed to reduce the amount of memory and the network bandwidth required by chef-client to process search results.

More patches, more love We’ve have a bug fix release for you today. Included are a couple fairly critical bug fixes for an issue with incorrect permissions with cookbook_file and remote_file on Windows. Also included is a whyrun fix for remote_directory.

As you may know, we officially announced our new Chef for OpenStack solution last week.  On the heels of that exciting news, we are pleased to be hosting an OpenStack-focused webinar with Opscode Private Chef™ customer DreamHost early next month. DreamHost is a global Web and cloud hosting provider with over 330,000 customers and 1.

We have a Chef release for you today and I’m personally pretty happy with keeping up release pace with community development. This release includes client-side support for collecting a summary of resource statistics on the total number of resources and number of resources updated in a run.

Opscode’s apache2 cookbook is commonly used as an example for reference material because Apache HTTPD server is fairly ubiquitous. Many, if not most, web operations teams currently use it, or have used it in their application stack.