It’s a really big day here at Opscode, and when I say big, I mean “10K nodes from one Chef server” big… “automating tens of thousands of servers” big… or, as our CTO Christopher Brown says, “Carl Sagan big.” Let me explain why: 1)     Chef 11 is now available for free download!

Opscode will be blowing into the Windy City in February for two great events. Join Opscode and Promet Source on Monday, February 11 at 5:00 PM for a night of learning, demos, and Chef 11 roadmap discussion.

Opscode is pleased to be a silver sponsor of the SCALE 11x conference in February.  We’ll be at the conference hosting a ½ Day Workshop and ½ Day Hack on February 22nd.  We’d love to see you there!  Use the code CHEF when registering and receive 40% off the price of conference admission.

Interested in learning about how you can use Chef to stand up a Hadoop cluster and manage big data within your organization?  We have teamed up with the folks at Edmunds.com who are using Chef to fully automate and manage their Hadoop infrastructure.

Following on the heels of our last blog on customer goodness, this time we’re profiling a company who many of you may already be familiar with – Prezi. Prezi provides an ‘open canvas’ that helps more than 17 million users better communicate their ideas.

Chef 10.18.2 Patch Release We’ve released Chef 10.18.2. This release fixes a bug where warning messages were incorrectly printed. Tickets Bug [CHEF-3771] – Spurious resource cloning warnings in 10.18.

The Chef Fundamentals course has landed in Europe.  We’re pleased to offer this 2 day course starting February 26, in Berlin, Germany.

Ohai 6.16.0 Released! Today we’ve released Ohai 6.16.0 featuring 21 bug fixes and improvements. Sascha Bates split up the Windows kernel plugin. If you’re not using the driver information, you can disable the “windows::kernel_devices” plugin to greatly reduce the amount of memory consumed by Ohai data in your Chef runs.

Chef 10.18.0 is now available in the usual places, with 30 bug fixes and improvements. Reminder Before we go over what’s new in 10.18.0, I’d like to remind you that we released a security fix for Chef Server last Friday. It’s extremely important that you upgrade as soon as possible.