Hello and Happy New Year Chef’s! It is 2018 and what better way to start the new year off than with an exciting cookbook release. I’m happy to announce that we have just released version 5.4.0 of the sql_server cookbook. Now, I know you’re thinking that this is not a major release.

At Chef, we believe that the most successful organizations are those that can outperform their peers on metrics of speed, efficiency, and risk. While there are clear benefits to be had by making measurable improvements on any of these outcomes, taken individually those benefits can only go so far.

Over the past few weeks, I have shared posts that describe the various tracks we are targeting for ChefConf this May 22-25 in Chicago.

If you develop or support applications on Windows, chances are that you have crossed paths or even worked deeply with Microsoft’s SQL Server database. In the 14 years I spent as a .Net developer, its by far the database I worked with most extensively. I’ve been using MySQL for all of my .

In 2017, we published more than 200 blog posts, highlighting major releases and announcements, partnerships and integrations, skill-building and how to articles, and more. Here are the top ten most viewed posts of 2017.

The Chef project has had an incredibly busy 2017 – and thank you all for your help and support! Our Community On GitHub, we’ve seen 3,733 Pull Requests, from 618 people. More than 50% of those Pull Requests were from non-Chef employees, which continues to amaze and delight me.

Chaos Happens! We are building and operating larger, more complex systems which leads to systems that degrade and fail in new and unexpected ways. We must learn to observe, respond to, and learn from these failures.

Editor’s note: This is a contributed guest post from our partners at Levvel who help their clients to successfully implement digital transformations in their organizations. You have a lifecycle for your application code—shouldn’t you have a lifecycle for your configuration as code, as well?

2017 has been an incredible year for InSpec; the community continues to grow and the project continues to evolve in amazing ways. As the year winds down, I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on our collective accomplishments.