As system administrators, we all hope our fleet has 24×7 uptime without any problems. Of course, we live in the real world and this isn’t always the case. So when the inevitable occurs, it is vital to quickly receive an alert to the problem so it can be quickly identified and fixed.

I recently returned from a week in Las Vegas at the VMworld 2017 conference. Besides the pleasure of speaking about Chef solutions with VMworld attendees, I had the honor of speaking with Alan Renouf of VMware about some new technology that VMware and Chef were bringing to market.

We are pleased to announce the first release of Habitat Integration for Visual Studio Team Services, released to the Visual Studio Marketplace. This extension brings the power and portability of Habitat to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). It contains a number of tasks that allow developers to package and release / export applications using Habitat.

Companies come to Niu Solutions to help them tackle difficult digital transformations while preserving their need for compliance. Learn how they applied detect and correct practices to tackle these challenges. The old engineers’ adage of “fast, safe and cheap, pick two” doesn’t apply in the cloud-native application world.

There are some exciting things happening in Chef Certification right now. If you dipped in previously and haven’t progressed, then you should come back to check it out. Before you do, here are some highlights of the changes.

High velocity companies – those that can quickly turn ideas into digital experiences for customers – use automation to get there. The concept of continuous automation is therefore generating a lot of interest. But what is continuous automation? What are the benefits? And how do you get there?

DevOps is making its way through every industry yet is still a concept that is not widely understood. A recent episode of the Federal Tech Talk series provides a perspective on DevOps including some insights on the definition, how to start practicing DevOps, and where to learn more.

In the first part of this series we got the Chef Automate Pilot container stack up and running on ECS. Now let’s make it survive termination of any container or EC2 instance without losing data by adding AWS RDS, EFS and Elasticsearch.

Chef Automate on Microsoft Azure is a Continuous Automation platform that provides the tools for automating modern and legacy architectures: a release pipeline model for test, review, and deployment automation; visibility into what’s changing and why; and a comprehensive solution for compliance automation.