From time to time, we get asked why new contributors to any Opscode project have to sign a Contributor License Agreement (or a Corporate Contributor License Agreement.

Over the weekend, we found out from our excellent community that the attributes improvements weren't totally backwards compatible as we thought. For now the 0.7.6 gems have been pulled from [deprecated location]* and we will be releasing Chef 0.7.8 later today which will fix the issues.

Since we had a new release of Chef, I needed to upgrade all my internal testing nodes to the new version. This was quick and painless, because I used Chef to upgrade itself. One reason why it was so easy is because the 0.7.6 release didn't have any changes that break backwards compatibility.

A lot of things happened in the last month since the 0.7.4 release! The MVP for this release is a new contributor, Grant Zanetti. Unfortunately we weren't able to secure a picture of Grant in time for the release post, but we imagine he's a handsome devil :-).

Ohai, we have a nice release for you today! Our MVP for Ohai 0.3.2 is James Gartrell, for adding Windows support! He had an itch to scratch, and thanks to his contribution, the whole community benefits! We're excited because this brings us one step closer to also having Chef available for Windows.

John Willis interviews Opscode’s CTO Adam Jacob at Velocity 2009.

Utilizing a mixture of open source tools (such as Chef, Nanite, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ) and battle-tested techniques, Adam and Ezra will show you how to build an infrastructure that’s easy to manage, integrates with your application, and is self-documenting.

We didn't do a blog post for Chef 0.7.2, as it was released in the midst of VelocityConf. And thanks to our observant community, we're releasing Chef 0.7.4 earlier than originally planned to fix a few bugs that crept in. Speaking of community, it's time to honor our MVP.

I was totally impressed with the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop – they clearly have the coolest bundle available. While watching the presentation, I whipped up a Chef Solo tarball that will install their Hadoop distribution for Ubuntu. First, make sure you have Chef installed, and then: chef-solo -r http://chef-solo-hadoop.s3.amazonaws.com/hadoop-cloudera-ubuntu.tar.gz And you are good to go!