Today I’m happy to announce the release of Chef 0.9.8, which is the first major feature update to the Chef 0.9 line and contains improvements and bug fixes in nearly every part of chef. Bootstrapping With Flavor Courtesy of many-time MVP Ian Meyer we now have support for using custom bootstrap scripts with knife.

Cloudy Operations – OSCON 2010 View more presentations from John Willis.

Using tools like Chef, you can connect metal or cloud provisioning to your configuration and systems integration process. For example, you can use the tool knife to provision cloud nodes and also register them in chef.

Last week, O’Reilly recorded a webcast preview and introduction for the Automated Infrastructure is on the Menu tutorial that Aaron Peterson and I will be presenting at OSCON on July 20th.

I have been in IT operations for over 30 years and I have seen a lot of good and bad ideas come and go.  I have been following the Devops movement for over a year now and I have kept my eyes very focused to the Devops radar.

Rachel Chalmers , Research Director at the 451 Group , recently published a Market Development note on Opscode , saying: "Opscode will celebrate its second birthday in September, and there will be plenty to celebrate. The company has raised $11m in a series B funding round from Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Chef Fundamentals (3 Days) Chef Fundamentals is a three-day comprehensive class covering the basic architecture of Chef and all of the underlying components. We will be covering installation basics of Chef Client and Chef Solo. Other topics will include: creating Chef repositories, creating cookbooks and advanced using of the new command line utility called Knife.

Today we announced the launch of our Open Training program in which we will make all of its enterprise training materials freely available to users of Chef. With today’s announcement, the Opscode "Chef Fundamentals" class will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License.

Join us for a Live Webcast – Chef Overview from Another Perspective Date: Friday, July 16, 2010 Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time (San Francisco, GMT-07:00) Instructor: John Willis VP of Services John Willis, Tivoli refugee, will hold forth on what it’s really “all about.