John Willis interviews Opscode’s CTO Adam Jacob at Velocity 2009.

Utilizing a mixture of open source tools (such as Chef, Nanite, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ) and battle-tested techniques, Adam and Ezra will show you how to build an infrastructure that’s easy to manage, integrates with your application, and is self-documenting.

We didn't do a blog post for Chef 0.7.2, as it was released in the midst of VelocityConf. And thanks to our observant community, we're releasing Chef 0.7.4 earlier than originally planned to fix a few bugs that crept in. Speaking of community, it's time to honor our MVP.

I was totally impressed with the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop – they clearly have the coolest bundle available. While watching the presentation, I whipped up a Chef Solo tarball that will install their Hadoop distribution for Ubuntu. First, make sure you have Chef installed, and then: chef-solo -r http://chef-solo-hadoop.s3.amazonaws.com/hadoop-cloudera-ubuntu.tar.gz And you are good to go!

Ohai, it’s been awhile! Since the last release was almost four months ago and we've had some new features added and some hairy bugs squashed, we thought a new version of Ohai, our system information gathering tool used with Chef, was in order. The Ohai 0.3.0 MVP is returning Chef 0.5.

Chef 0.7.0 is hot off the presses, and it brings several great new features along with the traditional heap of improvements and bug fixes. This is a big release, and the first since we released Chef back in January that hasn’t been backwards compatible.

One of the 9 Things to Like About Chef is that "it uses Ruby as the configuration language." We talk about that in that blog post, and we mention it on the wiki, but at the time we didn't have many examples.

We are pleased to announce the initial release of a new Chef repository and Amazon EC2 AMIs that can be used to bootstrap a Chef server and clients in the Cloud! In our experience as systems automation consultants, we built a library of best practices for designing and deploying web application infrastructures.

RailsConf 2009 may be over, but the work continues back at home as people put into practice the tools and concepts they learned about last week. We are excited about the buzz Chef made at the conference.