This post was originally published on Goat Can. “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying Enterprise IT Org as everyone else. We’re all part of the same compost heap. We’re all singing, all dancing crap of IT.

In a way, building IT infrastructure isn’t particularly exciting. Want to turn a Linux server into a MySQL database server? Enter some commands to install MySQL. Congratulations, you have successfully used some data (yum -y install mysql-server) to change the generic model (the out-of-the-box operating system). Much of our infrastructure is built the same way.

As you all know, we already have a humming operation in Europe. Now, many of our stateside Chefs are about to embark on a true European adventure, beginning with the London Cloud Summit (LCS) on January 29th.

Ohai chefs, Today we are making available a release candidate for the next major version of Ohai. This release (Ohai 7.0) sets us up for future improvements by resolving current architectural limitations, which will make it easier to build custom plugins.

This Thursday, 1/23, at 10 am PT, our friend John Martinez, who manages the Cloud Platform Engineering team at Adobe, will be joining us for a webinar detailing how his team uses Enterprise Chef, Jenkins, AWS, and more to operate a large, sophisticated cloud infrastructure.

Yesterday we gave a brief update on our new billing system and related process that was admittedly short on detail.

Eric Wolfe received a Commodore 128 computer when he was just five years old and quickly became fascinated with playing games on this new machine. The joys of tinkering with that old Commodore took him through the next decade.

The date of our upcoming webinar with Adobe has been changed to Thursday January 23rd at 10am PST. Please join us if you are you interested in learning about how you can use Enterprise Chef to manage Amazon Web Services infrastructure at scale from the ground up.

Our own Nathen Harvey recently created a rockin’ and rappin’ (litterally) video presentation on what DevOps is – and is not – called “DevOps with Me!”. We could write a whole bunch of words about how unique and creative Nathen’s comparisons are here, but we’ll let you be the judge.