On March 19th we’re excited to bring together Microsoft and Chef to dig into the technical specifics outlined in our recent joint partnership announcement. Michael Ducy (@mfdii) and Steven Murawski (@stevenmurawski) of Chef will be joined by Kundana Palagiri (@KundanaP) of Microsoft to dig into what is means to use Chef as the DevOps platform with Microsoft Azure.

ChefConf 2015 is just three weeks away! By now you’ve taken a look at the diverse selection of sessions and workshops scheduled for March 31-April 2 in Santa Clara. And, of course, you’ve already registered, right? So, what else is going down at the show? The ChefConf Community Summit!

In January we released Chef analytics 1.1 which added some great new features including * a flexible rules engine for notifications * inline diffs in the actions view * a new webhook notification destination At the time of the release, Chef analytics relied upon features only available in Chef Server 12.

We believe that diversity is critical in building a healthy community. One of our core goals is to help address the lack of diversity in attendees at ChefConf. What do we mean by diversity? Ashe Dryden wrote up an excellent blog post following a series of hangouts she held on diversity.

Manage 1.11.1 is now available from the Chef downloads site. This release includes a fix for a regression where “localhost” would be used in the Starter Kit instead of the correct Chef server URL. As always you can see the public changelog on hosted Chef at https://manage.chef.io/changelog.

This is a guest post by Phil Dibowitz, Production Engineer at Facebook At the Chef Community Summit this year, as with all Summits, there was a Hack Day. My hack project was to extend Chef’s `package` resource to be able to handle multiple packages at once. Why?

This is a guest post by Brock Spradling, Director of Sales and Marketing at Ostrato  On March 12th we’re excited to bring together OpenWhere, Chef and Ostrato on a webinar to discuss how this geospatial analytics startup is able to compete in the hyper-competitive defense marketplace.

Ohai Chefs, Today, we’re excited to announce that Chef Client 12.1.0 is now available. This release brings with it many new features and bug fixes. Below are some of the highlights. For more information, check out the changelog, release notes, and doc changes.

Last week we announced a new partnership with Microsoft, which was driven in large part by the intense demand we’re seeing in the enterprise for Chef x Azure, Chef x Powershell, and Chef x Visual Studio.