Opscode’s apache2 cookbook is commonly used as an example for reference material because Apache HTTPD server is fairly ubiquitous. Many, if not most, web operations teams currently use it, or have used it in their application stack.

This week at the OpenStack Summit, our friends at Cloudscaling released Version 2.0 of their Open Cloud System (OCS), delivering the agility, performance and economic benefits of the public cloud, but deployable in your data center and under your IT team’s control. OCS 2.

Today at the Electric Cloud Summit, Opscode is very excited to be announcing a collaboration with Electric Cloud around enterprise DevOps. In Electric Cloud, we not only see a company with an impressive user community and complementary technology, but an enthusiastic commitment to software delivery that rivals our own.

Chef for OpenStack provides a centralized, defined collection of code and best practices for using Chef to create and automate entire OpenStack infrastructures, as well as to launch entire application stacks on top of OpenStack clouds.

We’re seeing a large number of Chef users, whether open source, Hosted or Private, deploying, or beginning to investigate, continuous application delivery. Continuous delivery follows the path set out by agile development with the goal of accelerating time-to-market, while reducing production risks.

So easy, even a bizdev guy can do it! You’ll often hear Chef users rave about the consistency Chef brings to the configuration of their systems, or how it increases the speed and quality of deployments.

We have released version 0.6.0 of Test Kitchen. Thanks to Eric Wolfe, this release decouples RVM, so runtimes must be specified explicitly to run integration tests. We felt that this would be the least surprising thing for the most common current use of test kitchen: testing cookbooks.

We have another patch release for 10.14 for you today. This release is mostly fixes to the deploy provider and the error inspectors. The usual Rubygems, Debian packages and Omnibus packages are all up. Kendrick Martin was really helpful with some debugging work this release and has really been improving the Windows cookbooks.

Here at Opscode, we release a lot of cookbooks to the Chef Community site. Each individual cookbook is a separate software development project: they all have a git repository, a released “artifact” version, and as we extend cookbooks for test kitchen, tests. We follow particular process for releasing new versions.