This is a guest post by our friend Tom McLaughlin, Engineering Advocate at Threat Stack. It was first published on the Threat Stack blog on February 22, 2017. One of the challenges of building open source tools is figuring out how to package and distribute them. This is particularly true with web services.

ChefConf 2017, May 22-24 in Austin, TX is the place to be for the DevOps community! As an attendee, you’ll join a very engaged group of practitioners interested in learning and sharing all things automation and DevOps.

What if you could build software once and run it (almost) anywhere? Whether on a bare metal server, a virtual machine, or in a container? What if you could move a legacy application into the cloud without rewriting it?

Last week, we started a new, short-form, interactive webinar series focused on digital transformation, measuring success, and quantifying DevOps outcomes. This series is less technical than our typical Chef webinars and takes a closer look at strategy, the rationale behind driving transformation initiatives, and specific milestones that are useful in setting direction.

Over the last year, we’ve adopted a monthly release cadence for chef-client and chefdk. That regular cadence has served us well, allowing users to predictably plan for and schedule upgrades. Today, we’re pleased to announce that Chef Automate will follow suit and also adopt a monthly release cadence.

Last week, Chef sponsored and attended Container World in Santa Clara, CA . This was an unofficial stop on the ongoing Hands on Habitat World Tour, and we held a well attended workshop on getting started with Habitat and containers.

Config Management Camp is a conference that is 100% dedicated to configuration management. The conference took place February 6th and 7th at the SchoonMeersen Campus of the University College Gent. The event brought together config management users from all over Europe, including Chef staff from the US who gave talks on both Habitat and Chef.

Team Chef in Australia Chef had our first presence at Microsoft Ignite Australia in the Gold Coast February 14-17 and it was truly amazing!  Wendy Smith, Nell Shamrell, and I made the long journey down under from our Seattle headquarters to join our team in Australia: Paul Took and Matt Ray.

Collaboration is the latest enterprise buzzword. Collaboration applications like Slack, Atlassian HipChat, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Now it seems there are more collaboration tools than we know what to do with.