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!

Continuing our series of ChefConf Session Spotlights, I’m pleased to introduce Odie Routh. Odie is a member of a Lean Engineering team at Optum, a health care technology company. He works remotely from Vermont, and focuses on promoting DevOps practices by collaborating across as many departments and disciplines throughout the enterprise as he can.

On May 2 & 3, Chef proudly sponsored DevOps Days Austin and the Happy Hour event. I was in great company with four Chef presenters: Nathen Harvey, Matt Ray, Jody Wolfborn, and me – JJ Asghar.

We at Chef believe it is important to conduct public post mortems whenever possible. We recently conducted one around a Supermarket/Berkshelf incident that occurred on May 16, 2016. I was the incident commander for this incident and would like to share both the video and write up.

Signups are now open for the Chef Server HA beta program! Chef Server HA 2.0 is a completely new high availability (HA) architecture designed for mission-critical performance and reliability. During the open-invite beta period, running from now until July 1st, you’ll be able to try out this new feature and provide feedback. Chef Server HA 2.

We’re seven weeks from ChefConf, the huge community reunion open to everyone that celebrates our vibrant and passionate community. We’re busy preparing an invigorating blend of technology and local Austin experiences to energize everyone attending.