My notes from the conference
I didn’t have any plans for the ChefConf 2017 this year but luckily I got a free ticket just two weeks before.
It was fun, thanks to my colleagues from Microsoft with whom we had started to build an internal community. With their help I met and had a good conversations with some Chef folks, even hagged Nathen “the hugman” Harvey 
Chef 13 and ChefDK 2.0
Yes, finally, Chef 13 is officially released. Lots of improvements and lots of breaking changes. Now I need to fix some cookbooks to make them compatible with Chef13 and my team’s infrastructure is ready for the upgrade. 
Nothing special about ChefDK 2.0 except all internal tools were updated to newer versions. Good, steady progress for the solid tool.
Chef Automate
It looks pretty interesting especially when you compare it to Chef Management Console which was one of the reasons why my team decided to use free Chef server without any UI. Chef Automate has integrations with Chef, InSpec and Habitat.
InSpec
InSpec is a tool to automate a security compliance checks. It can be integrated with Chef and ChefAutomate or can be used as a standalone tool in an agent-less mode(using ssh or winrm). I found it’s pretty interesting and very similar to serverspec test framework. Built-in checkers already cover Linux and Windows and can detect some vulnerabilities(heartbleed, wannacry…), SSL and SSH misconfiguration and so on.
Learning portal
That’s fantastic. I made Chef training myself several times for my team and I know how hard it is to make them interesting and not difficult same time. Chef team accomplished this and the new learning portal covers everything you need to start with Chef. It goes from beginners topics to advanced. During exercises, you can choose to bring your own environment(containers, Vagrant), use cloud providers(Azure, AWS) or even use VM provided by learning portal for free.
Moreover, now everyone can become an certified Chef developer and earn cool badges.
Basic level costs 75$, others 175$.