As many of you know, the standard Microsoft lifecycle policy is 10 years of support (5 for mainstream + 5 for extended support) for business and developer products, such as SQL and Windows servers. At the end of the extended support period, patches or security updates are no longer provided, creating security and compliance issues.

ChefConf 2019 is going to be a blast! And in addition to the fun you will be having with the rest of the Chef community, there will be a lot of good old-fashioned learning opportunities. I want to call specific attention to three of the workshops being delivered on Monday, May 20.

I’m excited to announce that we have a new training course available for those learning Chef’s products and solutions: DevOps Pipeline! We understand the importance of an end-to-end workflow to automate all the things and this new class will help you accomplish that goal.

Following on from the recent announcement that Chef has achieved CIS certification across AWS, Azure and GCP let’s take a deeper look at how to get started with Chef InSpec on these cloud providers.  Starting with InSpec v3.7.7 there is profile generation support for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

What does end of support for an Operating System (such as Windows Server 2008 or RHEL 5) have to do with Digital Transformation? The speed of modern business necessitates a much faster time to market and higher quality applications. But your existing application estate will determine your modernization strategy.

One of the greatest thrills of working in Open Source is receiving your first pull request. Learning that someone not only took an interest in your project, but took enough interest to fork the code, make a change, and then submit it as a pull request is such an incredible feeling.

ChefConf 2019 is our time to get together with our community, learn from each other, and celebrate all the amazing things we’ve accomplished together over the year. One of the ways we love to recognize the contributions and hard work of our community is through the Awesome Community Chef Awards.

Chef is excited to announce that we have achieved official Center for Internet Security certification on the Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmarks (level 1 & level 2).

Federal agencies work hard to provide value to consumers of their services, but in order to deliver updates at the velocity their customers demand, they must ensure their infrastructure is hardened and secure throughout the software development lifecycle.