Software-based services — apps! — are now the primary way a company connects with customers. A company’s best chance in competing for a larger piece of the market is by shipping software faster. Teams need to continuously deliver infrastructure to run applications, regardless of location or computing environment.

The Chef community is full of many awesome individuals who contribute and do exceptional things every day. Each year at ChefConf, individuals are awarded the Awesome Community Chef award.

Last week Chef was in Berlin for the 2017 edition of Kubecon EU. For me personally, this was my second CloudNativeCon/Kubecon, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. The attendees of CloudNativeCon/Kubecon seem to be some of the brightest conference attendees I’ve seen.

Chef has been busy shipping a lot of new software lately. Here are some of the releases that have shipped in the last few weeks! Chef Server The Chef Server was recently updated to consolidate credentials that are stored on the system.

On 22nd March I had the pleasure along with a few other Chefs of being invited to the Computing DevOps Excellence Awards hosted at the Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel in London.

On March 22, we held our third webinar in a four part series focused on digital transformation. In that session, we focused on the considerations around increasing speed. In case you missed it, you can watch a recording of the second episode, “Increasing Speed” below.

As software defines the products and experience companies offer their customers, Chef has had a front-row seat influencing how companies have had to change. Companies had to learn to become software companies. When Adam Jacob wrote Chef, he created a framework for this transition.

Chef has been on the road hosting workshops to help people take an applications-first approach to automation with Habitat. Our most recent stops on our Hands on With Habitat world tour were March 22 and 23 in San Francisco and San Jose. These workshops are aimed at anyone involved in building, deploying, or managing applications.

In my last post, I talked about some of the benefits of containers, how containers can complicate compliance requirements, and how InSpec can help. InSpec provides a human-readable infrastructure and compliance testing language that allows you to scan your hosts, VMs, and containers to ensure your fleet’s compliance. But let’s take this one step further.