Chef was built from the beginning as an extensible framework that makes IT professionals’ lives easier. This extensibility has always led to interesting and exciting contributions from the community of Chef users. Innovative solutions for common challenges and process and tooling improvements help Chef users change the way IT works.

The Opscode Community Summit kicks off this week in Seattle. The Summit is an annual gathering of community members for two days of Open Spaces discussing the topics that are most important to the people in the community. Participants share their ideas, triumphs, and challenges with Chef and other personal projects.

We are looking forward to resuming our Chef Fundamentals Webinar Series this Thursday at 10am PT with Module 4: Understanding the chef-client run and using knife to learn about your Infrastructure.

November brings with it a bunch of opportunities to meet up with your fellow Chefs.

Hey Chefs, Today is an exciting day. We are announcing Chef Client 11.8.0 & Ohai 6.20.0. Here are the biggest highlights of these releases: Chef Client Local Mode Chef Client now has a local mode in which it can run 100% locally using a chef repository.

SSL and Chef As Chef has grown up, we've found that we've needed to revisit some decisions we made when Chef was an unruly upstart open source project. One such decision is how Chef handles HTTPS connections by default. Currently, Chef defaults to not verifying certificates when it makes HTTPS connections.

In Chef 11.8, we’re excited to introduce local mode with `chef-client -z`.

Our close friends at CustomInk make it easy for anyone to create customized T-shirts, sweatshirts, and much more online. (Sidenote: We work with them to make all our Opscode and Chef T-Shirts). CustomInk employs proprietary, primarily Ruby-based software applications running on both virtualized and cloud servers to manage everything from its website to its printers.

Thanks to everyone who turned out for the second installment of our Chef Fundamentals Webinar Series yesterday! If you were unable to attend and would like to catch up on the series, you can find recordings of each prior module at #learnchef.opscode.