Like most open source projects, Chef began with an itch. From a small group of friends and colleagues, a band of system administrators who wanted a better way to build infrastructure, we have grown into a large and supportive community.

When you utilize cloud resources as a commodity, it can sometimes be hard to differentiate between individual systems. While testing some Chef installations on EC2 instances I asked myself, “which of these instances registered with my Chef server did I create a few hours ago?

For the holidays this year, we really want to give our fellow Windows Systems Administrators a leg-up in the DevOps cultural revolution. What better way to tear down walls and bring together two groups with historically opposed expectations from their company leadership, than with a common tool.

It is likely that you have already heard about Windows support in Chef, from early blog posts on the work to press releases. But, one milestone that we have reached that may have slipped under your radar is the Chef installer for Windows.

We have added source code browsing and README parsing features to the community site. When browsing a cookbook, you will find a new tab at the top labeled “Source Code” and selecting this will allow you to review the files in the latest version of that cookbook.

It has been only three months since 0.10.4 and we have another huge release for you. Once again, the Chef community has delivered. Andrea Campi of European consulting shop Zephirworks has been hard at work.

InfoQ just posted a great video & presentation of Michael T. Nygard talking about using Chef in the datacenter and in the cloud for managing physical and virtual systems at GOTO Aarhus.

Bryan Barry over at the devopsanywhere blog has written a great post about Chef containing his thoughts on why you might want to start using Chef to manage your infrastructure.

You may have noticed from recent posts to the mailing list, or by watching the ticket system that we have been pretty busy updating our cookbooks with community contributions and other fixes.