By popular demand, I will run a second free Webex training session where I introduce Chef and show how to set up your organization on the Opscode Platform this Wednesday. Then on Thursday, John Willis will demonstrate an awesome, lightweight approach for user management with Chef.

Caleb Tennis is one of Chef’s earliest adopters, and has been submitting valuable patches to Chef since the early days of 0.7.0. He works at CloudBees, which aims to be the leading Java Platform as a Service.

I will be doing a free Webex training introducing Chef and showing how to set up your organization on the Opscode Platform. We’ll look at a simple example cookbook and talk about some of the components used, as well as how to manage cookbooks as source code for your systems infrastructure.

A few of us from the Training, Services and Evangelism team will be presenting at VMworld next week.

As many of you know, over the past 18 months, Chef has become the standard for cloud infrastructure automation, and is used by RightScale, EngineYard, VMware, Rackspace, OpenStack, and many others. Chef works anywhere: in data-centers, inside virtual machines, on desktops, and in the cloud.

Today I’m happy to announce the release of Chef 0.9.8, which is the first major feature update to the Chef 0.9 line and contains improvements and bug fixes in nearly every part of chef. Bootstrapping With Flavor Courtesy of many-time MVP Ian Meyer we now have support for using custom bootstrap scripts with knife.

Cloudy Operations – OSCON 2010 View more presentations from John Willis.

Using tools like Chef, you can connect metal or cloud provisioning to your configuration and systems integration process. For example, you can use the tool knife to provision cloud nodes and also register them in chef.

Last week, O’Reilly recorded a webcast preview and introduction for the Automated Infrastructure is on the Menu tutorial that Aaron Peterson and I will be presenting at OSCON on July 20th.