Today in IT, the need to maintain security and governance is often at odds with the imperative to move quickly. At this year’s ChefConf, compliance and security were topics of much discussion among presenters and attendees alike.

We enjoyed meeting so many members of the community at the AWS Summit in New York City last week! The Summit started Wednesday, August 10th with a full day of sessions including one on Securing Cloud Workloads with DevOps Automation. There was also an awesome startup simulation where participants acted as a DevOps lead.

The Event Chef was a proud sponsor of DevOpsDays Portland on August 9th & 10th at the Oregon Convention Center. A sold-out, diverse crowd gathered for keynotes, presentations, lightning talks, and open spaces to learn, discuss, and promote all things DevOps.

In this Habitat 301 session from ChefConf 2016, Jamie Winsor, senior software engineer at Chef, discusses the design of the Habitat build service, including the use of such technologies such as ZeroMQ and protocol buffers (protobufs) — as well as Habitat itself — to build a dynamically-scalable distributed system.

In this Habitat 201 talk from ChefConf 2016, George Miranda, product marketing manager at Chef, talks about how Habitat integrates into the rest of the ecosystem around containers and modern application management. He discusses Habitat’s integrations with Docker, rkt, Mesosphere and Kubernetes and what role Habitat plays in this world.

We were delighted to welcome so many of you to ChefConf 2016 this year, particularly the newest members of our community: the Habitat users. We saw incredible interest in Habitat at ChefConf such that we had to repeat all the sessions the next day, due to overflow crowds.

What is Chef Automate? Chef Automate is our new approach to scaling up the use of automation across your organization. It builds on our open-source projects: Chef for infrastructure and cloud automation, InSpec for compliance automation, and the newly released Habitat for application automation.

I’d like to announce that Cask Data is now part of the Chef Partner Cookbook Program. They have certified the Cask Data Application Platform Cookbook. Cask Data is a startup in Palo Alto, California focused on enabling developers access to the powerful technology of big data without the steep learning curve.

The Chef Community  came alive at ChefConf in Austin last week with more than 1,500 passionate DevOps leaders, practitioners, and innovators meeting to talk infrastructure, applications, automation and driving business value through IT. Our CEO Barry Crist took the stage to talk about what it means to ship ideas in today’s modern workplace.