Are you headed to Orlando for IBM Innovate next week? If so, be sure to check out Opscode’s VP of Solutions, George Moberly, at the event spreading the good word on Chef.

In hopes of helping all of you in the Community stay up-to-date on what tech press are providing in terms of news, opinions, and best practices from end-users, this post marks the first in an ongoing series of ‘news round-ups’ we’ll be posting every couple weeks here at Opscode’s blog.

From raising money for those impacted by the tornado in Oklahoma, to helping people fight cancer, Indiegogo crowd-funds important, even life-changing projects the world over. To do so, the company uses Rackspace to power a flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure behind all the awesome projects and site traffic.

I’m happy to announce bifrost, the Hosted Chef’s new permission manager, was successfully deployed yesterday at 11:30 AM PDT. The deploy took longer than we had estimated based on over a dozen rehearsal deploys. We apologize for the inconvenience of the outage and longer-than-normal deploy window.

The folks at Google have just published a major update to “knife-google” plugin for Google Compute Engine. Included in this update is a removal of the “gcutil” tookit as an external dependency, meaning that knife-google users can talk directly to the Compute Engine API to spin up new GCE instances and manage them with Chef.

I recently wrote about the updates coming soon to Hosted Chef. In particular I described a brand-new permissions manager then scheduled to be deployed the evening of 5/8. This deploy did not occur.

This release adds a feature for setting user passwords on Solaris, fixes a bug in Resource.const_defined?, and adds SSL root certificates to the Omnibus packages. Ranjib Dey added support for Google Cloud Engine Linux (GCEL), Google’s Ubuntu derivative. Thanks Ranjib! You’re this releases MVP!

#ChefConf 2013 was a roaring success! Our second annual conference was full of great keynotes, insightful workshops, informative track sessions, and the awesome Chef community. #ChefConf 2013 sold out with more than 700 people in attendance and hundreds more watching the live video stream of the keynote sessions.

Over the next several weeks Opscode Engineering and Ops teams will be upgrading a number of systems in Hosted Chef. These upgrades are the result of months of behind the scenes hard work.