The Chef 11 Server provides significant improvements in terms of compute efficiency, scalability, and operability. We achieved these improvements by rewriting the API server in Erlang and switching the data store from CouchDB to PostgreSQL.

We have a release today for both the 11.x and 10.x Chef Client tracks. This release is compatible with the changes in the recent 1.7.7 release of the JSON gem that worked around a DoS vulnerability by disabling the create_additions option by default.

Here’s a quick list of the Opscode-related events going on this week.

On Wednesday a new version of the net-ssh gem was released that modified its dependencies on other Ruby libraries. These changes caused Rubygems to be unable to calculate a set of dependencies for a number of applications, including Chef. This made it not possible to install Chef from a gem package without extensive workarounds.

Chef 11 In-Depth: Client Improvements On the client side, Chef 11 development focused on a broad range of improvements rather than a few major features. We had two sweet new features from our Co-MVPs, and a handful of improvements from Opscode.

I’d like to start by sharing a statement that was articulated to me a while ago by a vendor of antiquated enterprise technologies : “It’s not about the tool but the craftsman that wields it.

Chef 11 In-Depth: Attributes Rewrite Chef’s attributes system is frequently cited by power users as one of their favorite features. Chef users love having the flexibility to tune their applications based on a node’s role or environment. Since we first introduced the current attributes system in Chef 0.

We’ve been posting a lot of cool news today and now it’s time for a bit more… Our friends at Cycle Computing helped test the scale of the new Chef 11 last week, creating a 10K+ server instance (10,598 servers, to be exact) in AWS using only a single Chef 11 server. The results? Dynamite.

Early Bird pricing for #ChefConf 2013 has started. Get your ticket today! #ChefConf will be held April 24-26 in San Francisco. Join hundreds of system administrators, application developers, and other IT professionals to collaborate on creating the future of infrastructure automation.