I’d like to announce that Rackspace is now part of the Chef Partner Cookbook Program. Their first cookbook is rackspace_monitoring which provides some Custom Resources to help administer Cloud Monitoring for resources in the Rackspace cloud.

Next up in our ChefConf Session Spotlight series, we’d like to draw your attention to Sean Walberg. Sean is a DevOps practitioner with the National Football League’s digital media division, which encompasses all of the league’s websites and streaming. Over the past two-plus years he’s used Chef to help automate website operations and reduce downtime.

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 month I had the privilege of attending my first technical conference. Before my acceptance as an intern at Chef, I applied for and received an Opportunity Scholarship to attend RailsConf 2016. Opportunity Scholars are new to the Rails community and are at RailsConf to have their first tech conference experience.

Hearst Business Media is a global technology leader delivering information, insights, analytics, and workflow solutions to meet worldwide needs in the finance, healthcare and transportation markets. ​ Chef did a Q&A session with Hearst’s Vice President of DevOps, Pauly Comtois.

Continuing our series of ChefConf Session Spotlights, today we’re profiling Charity Majors — Awesome Chef and Chef Board of Governance member. Charity has been using Chef for four-plus years and is currently trying to make the world safe for machine data as co-founder and CTO of Hound.

Next up in our series of ChefConf Session Spotlights, I’m delighted to introduce Victoria Blessing who will presenting a session in our transformation track. Victoria is an Operations Engineer for the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, managing the college’s Unix web infrastructure since 2014. All Linux nodes are Chef-managed.

I’d like to announce that Threat Stack is now part of the Chef Partner Cookbook Program. Threat Stack is a cloud-native security monitoring service that enables growth-driven companies to scale with confidence by identifying and verifying insider threats, external attacks, and data loss in real-time.

Regulatory compliance and security concerns are facts of life for every enterprise. Businesses are facing increased scrutiny in a world where data breaches and security hacks happen every other day. Companies need to be agile in order to respond to attacks, but the average business takes 256 days to find compromises!