We ran our third Opscamp this weekend in San Francisco.  Like the Austin Opscamp we ran back in January, this one was great.   We had over 150 people registered and wound up with about 100 actual attendees.  GWOS provided the facility and did a great job with breakfast and lunch.

Hi, my name is John Willis, and I am the VP of Training, Services, & Evangelism (TSE) at Opscode.  I have been on-board for about three months and have been very busy building a team, creating our first materials, and getting everything off the ground. Here’s how we work: Our mission is simple: Massive Chef Adoption. Here is an overview of how we will do this: Training We recently completed our first 3-day Chef Training (it sold out BTW!) and are planning many more.   We will be doing regular public, private and web based training sessions, labs, and workshops.  If you are interested in Opscode training for you, your company, or your city please fill out our training form. Services We are working with a select group of trusted partners who are experienced with Opscode, Chef, and Infrastructure Automation.  We will be supporting them as they deploy Chef and the Opscode Platform for their customers.  Expect to see some exciting announcements around alliances and partnerships in the upcoming weeks, followed by broader program in the coming months. Evangelism We are building a exceptional team of industry experts that who love speaking, coding and writing about implementing world class Infrastructure Automation. We will spread the word around the world speaking at some of the most exciting open source, cloud, and infrastructure conferences.  When you run into one of us, please come over and talk!  We eat, drink and sleep Infrastructure Automation, Cloud Computing, and DevOps and want to help you do awesome stuff (even if it isn’t Chef related). We are also huge supporters of OpsCamp and DevOps meetups and will be available at many of these events. I hope that gives you a little insight into what we are cooking up here at Opscode.  Stay tuned! Here is a list of places you can find us over the next few months. Upcoming Cloudcamps and Opscamps Cloudcamp Denver Cloudcamp Detroit Opscamp Seattle Opscamp Atlanta Scaling and Managing Applications in the Cloud Gov2.0 Expo Washington, DC – Wednesday, May 26th 2010 Jesse Robbins Configuration Management in the Cloud Gluecon 2010 Denver – Thursday, May 27th John Willis The Cambrian Cloud Explosion Epicenter 2010 Dublin – Thursday, June 10th John Willis Configuration Management in the Cloud Epicenter 2010 Dublin – Thursday, June 11th John Willis Infrastructure Automation with Chef Velocity 2010 Santa Clara – Tuesday, June 22nd John Willis, Adam Jacob Configuration Management With Chef 2010 Usenix Cloud Configuration Management Summit Boston – Thursday, June 24th Aaron Peterson Does the Cloud Need DevOps Devopsdays USA Santa Clara  – Friday, June 25th John Willis Automated Infrastructure is on the Menu with Chef OSCON 2010 – Operations Portland – Tuesday, July 20th Joshua Timberman Opening Session OSCON 2010 – Cloud Summit Portland – Tuesday, July 20th Simon Wardley and John Willis Cloudy Operations OSCON 2010 – Cloud Summit Portland – Tuesday, July 20th John Willis Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing OSCON 2010 – Cloud Computing Portland – Wednesday, July 21th John Willis The Infrastructure Philharmonic OSCON 2010 – Operations Portland – Thursday, July 22nd John Willis

Please join us for a one hour presentation called “Introduction to Chef”. The presentation is a free Web based session that will include a fifteen minute Q&A.

We have published new Amazon EC2 AMIs for Ubuntu 10.04 with Chef 0.8.16. The identifiers are: ami-17f51c7e (Ubuntu 10.04, 32bit, Chef 0.8.16) ami-eff51c86 (Ubuntu 10.04, 64bit, Chef 0.8.16) The wiki page is updated with the AMI ID’s and now includes instructions on how you can roll your own AMIs.

It’s Chef release time again! Today we bring you 0.8.16, which fixes bugs we’d missed in 0.8.14. Akzhan Abdulin is your MVP for fixing a bug in cookbook display in the Web UI. Thanks, Akzhan!

May 10, 2010 — Christopher Brown joins Opscode from Microsoft, where he was a Director of Engineering for the Edge Computing Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft, Christopher was a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.coms Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”).

This week we are pleased to announce a very special release: Elizabeth Gregory Jacob. The Release MVP is Katie Bethell who worked literally non-stop for the past 9 months, with assistance from Adam Jacob . Both will be critical to the ongoing development of what looks like a very promising project. Congratulations, and Awesome work!

It’s Chef release time again! This time, we’re skipping 0.8.12 and heading right to 0.8.14 due to a hiccup in our publishing process. Chef 0.8.14 has a huge amount of bug fixes and improvements, thanks to the tireless work of our awesome community. Most importantly, Chef 0.8.

We are pleased to announce the release of two new cookbooks to aid in deploying applications that are designed to be completely data driven. The new cookbooks are: application database They are designed to work with a Chef Server such as the Opscode Platform, and be driven by Data Bags and Search Indexes.