SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software that helps companies of all sizes and industries run better, has reshaped their processes to enable the speed developers need. Over the last two years SAP adopted Chef to automate their on demand deployment of their developer landscapes.

Last year, we conducted a survey of more than 1,500 Chef customers to help us better understand their most pressing issues related to automation: productivity, roles and technology adoption. As we’ve noted in the past, the highest-performing software organizations are able to outperform their peers in each of three key areas, and associated metrics.

I’m happy to announce a new feature that has been merged into the upstream kitchen-vra driver. You now have the ability to use the Catalog Names instead of the Catalog IDs for your instances. If you use VMware vRealize Automation everyday like I do, this is a really important addition to kitchen-vra.

In government, compliance and security are a critical component of our job function. The current state of compliance frameworks are bulky and unwieldy for those inexperienced with OpenSCAP/XML. Microsoft Azure Government cloud and InSpec are designed to provide a common language for security, compliance, and automation teams to converge around.

One of the key reasons organizations look at cloud migration is to improve the security of their IT systems. Cloud vendors such as AWS bring a level of expertise and scale to security that is impossible for an IT organization to replicate in a traditional datacenter.

Tickets are on sale now for ChefConf 2018 in Chicago May 22-25. ChefConf is the must-attend DevOps conference that brings together the best voices in the industry for a week of insightful, disruptive, and thought-provoking conversations driving digital change in IT.

Chef has always been built atop a very strong open-source community. However, we’ve heard from many of you that it’s hard to find news about new features being developed in our open-source projects.

For vendors, configuration management has become as important as the software itself. As a vendor you should take responsibility and provide proper cookbooks for your software that fulfill the requirements for as many users as possible.

Earlier this month, Google Project Zero announced several security vulnerabilities in many modern processors, commonly referred to by the names Spectre and Meltdown. These vulnerabilities arise from the exploitation of performance optimizations in modern CPUs, features known as branch prediction and speculative execution.