With both private and public clouds, increasingly complex virtualized environments and data getting bigger every day, DevOps folks are looking for ways to automate their infrastructure and expose data that informs important decisions about how to manage their enterprise. That's why we're partnering with Opscode, the creator of Chef, to host the Chef 101 Workshop at CloudOpen. Using Ruby as its scripting language, Chef has quickly become one of the most popular tools for developers and systems administrators to define, build and manage infrastrucutre.

Congratulations to Brian Beck and Sabrina Aqil, our two winners in The Linux Foundation's 2012 "Inspired by Linux" T-shirt Design Contest! Their awesome t-shirt designs took first and second place, respectively, in the community vote.

Opscode's open source framework Chef is part of the orchestration layer of platform-agnostic software aimed at allowing developers to create a reproducible blueprint for server configuration and automation. CTO Chris Brown says IaaS and PaaS architects could take a lesson from Chef in finding a common recipe for communicating capabilities between machines in a cloud or between clouds.

This week the open cloud news headlines feature a new OpenNebula release, a new cloud controller plug-in for OpenStack and an interview with Rackspace's Lew Moorman on APIs and the open cloud.