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.

Supporting our customers has always been top of our priority list here at Opscode. Ensuring that you, the customer, are successful at learning and leveraging the considerable power of Chef requires a team of dedicated professionals. Opscode has historically been a community-driven product, with collaboration and openness at the forefront of that movement.

Yes, that’s right, folks, Facebook, one of the largest infrastructures on the planet, has deployed Opscode Private Chef™ to automate configuration and management within its web-tier infrastructure. Why did Facebook need Chef? Because Facebook’s infrastructure team has to manage thousands of servers, configurations, and administrative access policies across a very dynamic compute environment.

We’re incredibly proud to share the latest major release of Chef with you. The Chef Client and Chef Server are now separate projects. We will be making separate but compatible releases moving forward. You can download both of them from the Chef download page.

It’s a really big day here at Opscode, and when I say big, I mean “10K nodes from one Chef server” big… “automating tens of thousands of servers” big… or, as our CTO Christopher Brown says, “Carl Sagan big.” Let me explain why: 1)     Chef 11 is now available for free download!

Opscode will be blowing into the Windy City in February for two great events. Join Opscode and Promet Source on Monday, February 11 at 5:00 PM for a night of learning, demos, and Chef 11 roadmap discussion.

Opscode is pleased to be a silver sponsor of the SCALE 11x conference in February.  We’ll be at the conference hosting a ½ Day Workshop and ½ Day Hack on February 22nd.  We’d love to see you there!  Use the code CHEF when registering and receive 40% off the price of conference admission.

Interested in learning about how you can use Chef to stand up a Hadoop cluster and manage big data within your organization?  We have teamed up with the folks at Edmunds.com who are using Chef to fully automate and manage their Hadoop infrastructure.

Following on the heels of our last blog on customer goodness, this time we’re profiling a company who many of you may already be familiar with – Prezi. Prezi provides an ‘open canvas’ that helps more than 17 million users better communicate their ideas.