After taking Chef Essentials or spending time on learn.chef.io, you might still feel there’s a gulf between what you’ve learned and the details of automating your real-world infrastructure. In this article, I’ll outline some common starting points for writing your own Chef recipes, and point you to frequently-used tools and reference resources.

It’s not surprising that the vast majority of organizations are undertaking digital transformation projects to keep up with the pace of change in business. What is interesting is how the age of an organization impacts the priority and objective of the elements of their respective transformation.

We are constantly asked to deliver our infrastructure faster at what seems like a compromise of its quality. Waiting until it’s time to deploy into production is not the moment to see if the cookbooks we have written will work.

The Learn Chef team has some news to share! In only four months since we launched the new learning site for Chef practitioners we’ve reached an awesome milestone – over 10,000 users have created a Learn Chef Rally account to track their learning progress.

Today, we are excited to announce the availability of Chef Automate on Azure Stack, via Marketplace Syndication. Microsoft Azure Stack brings the flexibility, scalability and reliability of the Azure public cloud to private, on-premises infrastructures.

A key reason that an enterprise adopts infrastructure automation is to allow for the fast and efficient deployment and ongoing management of their infrastructure.

As system administrators, we all hope our fleet has 24×7 uptime without any problems. Of course, we live in the real world and this isn’t always the case. So when the inevitable occurs, it is vital to quickly receive an alert to the problem so it can be quickly identified and fixed.

I recently returned from a week in Las Vegas at the VMworld 2017 conference. Besides the pleasure of speaking about Chef solutions with VMworld attendees, I had the honor of speaking with Alan Renouf of VMware about some new technology that VMware and Chef were bringing to market.

We are pleased to announce the first release of Habitat Integration for Visual Studio Team Services, released to the Visual Studio Marketplace. This extension brings the power and portability of Habitat to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It contains a number of tasks that allow developers to package and release / export applications using Habitat.