The Chef community is full of many awesome individuals who contribute and do exceptional things every day. Each year at ChefConf, individuals are awarded the Awesome Community Chef award.

Looking for ways to spice up your Chef usage on AWS? In this recored session from ChefConf 2016, Josh Campbell, a partner solutions architect at AWS, shows you how to leverage services like AWS Lambda, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), Amazon CloudWatch Events, and Amazon EC2 Run Command with Chef.

Matt Wrock has a new article in the Skills Library, “Create a Windows Server 2016 Vagrant box with Chef and Packer.” In it, Matt talks about how to use Chef and Packer together to create a Windows Server 2016 on a Vagrant box.

At ChefConf 2016, Boris Scholl, Principal PM for Azure, presented, “Building Modern Cloud Applications on Azure.” Watch the recorded session below to hear why Microsoft is betting on open source in the cloud, how they enable, integrate, release and contribute to it, and why it’s important for your DevOps practices, wherever you are in your journey.

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.