When it comes to audits, many organizations face a dilemma: how to decrease the time and effort spent while improving results? In preparation for an annual PCI audit, Carter McHugh, Executive Director of Agile Architecture at CSG International, decided to partner with Chef Software to automate their audit processes.

This week we passed a significant Learn Chef Rally milestone: more than 25,000 of you have created an account to track your progress! This reinforces that we have an amazing community of users interested in honing their chef skills.

Today we are announcing the end-of-life date of Chef Server for Linux on IBM Z and Linux on IBM Power Systems to be May 1, 2019. Support for Chef Server on the x86_64 processor architecture is not affected by this announcement.

Here’s this month’s round up of what happened in October across the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities. Chef This month’s release of Chef 14 is Chef 14.6.47.

A little over one year ago, Christopher Maier presented the ability to create composite packages, a special kind of Habitat package that includes other Habitat packages in order to be managed by a single Supervisor.

A little over two years ago, the Habitat project was begun, with the idea that applications can move much faster if we design automation from the application’s point of view. This took the form of an abstraction, and a contract, between the application layer and the underlying infrastructure beneath it.

We are excited to announce that Chef Workstation, which we first released in beta at ChefConf 2018, is now generally available.

We’re excited to announce the release of InSpec 3.0! Since the last major revision of InSpec in February, InSpec has been downloaded 49270 times, we’ve merged more than 330 pull requests from 85 contributors, and added dozens of new resources. The 3.0 release includes a ton of bug fixes, usability improvements, and additional platform support.

Today we are announcing the end-of-life date for support of the DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) High Availability feature of Chef Server to be March 31, 2019. The DRBD HA topology has been deprecated for over two years, since the release of Chef HA (also known as Chef Backend) and Chef Server 12.9.