Folks using Chef already know its the easiest and best way to get an automated server infrastructure up and running. We here at Opscode have been hard at work making it even easier. In his latest episode of the Opscode Screencast, CTO Adam Jacob gives a sneak peek of what’s coming in the Chef 0.

It’s that time again! I’m pleased to announce the release candidates of Chef 0.7.12 and Ohai 0.3.4. I hope you’ll take the time to test both releases on a development snapshot of any production infrastructure, and report bugs towards the 0.7.12 and 0.3.4 projects on JIRA. I’ve tentatively scheduled the release of 0.7.12 and 0.3.

Today I bring to you a tasty new release of Chef, courtesy of our fantastic MVP, Daniel (kallistec) DeLeo. Dan scoops the MVP for a snappy refactor, and some very cool in-progress SCM work which I’m sure we'll all see soon.

As mentioned in our announcement of Chef packages in Ubuntu's Karmic Koala release, we are working on getting Chef and its dependencies in various Debian and Ubuntu releases. We also said we would create an APT repository, and now following distribution releases are available: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala"Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"Ubuntu 8.

We are very excited to announce that Chef packages and related dependencies have been accepted into Ubuntu's Karmic Koala release! This is a great milestone in the effort to get Debian/Ubuntu packages of Chef available.

Jeppe Nejsum Madsen scoops up the MVP this release for fixing an annoying bug related to fetching remote files, usually encountered in combination with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (CHEF-296) – and also for alerting us to his patch being missing from 0.7.6!  Thanks, for the patch, and the keen eye, Jeppe.

From time to time, we get asked why new contributors to any Opscode project have to sign a Contributor License Agreement (or a Corporate Contributor License Agreement.

Over the weekend, we found out from our excellent community that the attributes improvements weren't totally backwards compatible as we thought. For now the 0.7.6 gems have been pulled from [deprecated location]* and we will be releasing Chef 0.7.8 later today which will fix the issues.

Since we had a new release of Chef, I needed to upgrade all my internal testing nodes to the new version. This was quick and painless, because I used Chef to upgrade itself. One reason why it was so easy is because the 0.7.6 release didn't have any changes that break backwards compatibility.