In September of last year, the team faced one of its first challenges in responding to the growing user base of Hosted Chef. The on-call engineer at the time received an alert that the queue used to store Chef objects waiting to be indexed for search was backed up.

In a few days we’ll be officially announcing #ChefConf 2012, our inaugural community conference. #ChefConf will be held May 15-17th in Burlingame, California. We’re really excited about what we’re putting together. The CFP is open now!

Opscode is proud to be a sponsor of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this upcoming weekend in Los Angeles. SCALE is one of the premier open source events in the United States and we encourage you to attend.

Food Fight is a new podcast for the Chef community, discussing and summarizing the assorted news and topics of the day. It’s hosted by community member Bryan Berry and Opscode employee Matt Ray. They plan on interviewing lots of people from the greater Chef community and publishing every few weeks.

Like most open source projects, Chef began with an itch. From a small group of friends and colleagues, a band of system administrators who wanted a better way to build infrastructure, we have grown into a large and supportive community.

When you utilize cloud resources as a commodity, it can sometimes be hard to differentiate between individual systems. While testing some Chef installations on EC2 instances I asked myself, “which of these instances registered with my Chef server did I create a few hours ago?

For the holidays this year, we really want to give our fellow Windows Systems Administrators a leg-up in the DevOps cultural revolution. What better way to tear down walls and bring together two groups with historically opposed expectations from their company leadership, than with a common tool.

It is likely that you have already heard about Windows support in Chef, from early blog posts on the work to press releases. But, one milestone that we have reached that may have slipped under your radar is the Chef installer for Windows.

We have added source code browsing and README parsing features to the community site. When browsing a cookbook, you will find a new tab at the top labeled “Source Code” and selecting this will allow you to review the files in the latest version of that cookbook.