Author:

Kimball Johnson

Kimball Johnson is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress and a seasoned DevOps practitioner with deep experience across modern infrastructure and cloud-native environments. He has built his career alongside engineers, operators, and product teams, tackling the real-world challenges of designing, building, and operating systems that must evolve without compromising reliability. Drawing on expertise in infrastructure, automation, platform engineering, and developer tooling, Kimball helps teams adopt practices tailored to their context, balancing technical rigor with sustainability, trust, and clear communication, while fostering open conversations about trade-offs, failure and continuous improvement.


Operating Infrastructure at Scale - Beyond Jobs and Workflows

Organizations are shifting from isolated servers to shared, dynamic infrastructure platforms, increasing the need for continuous visibility and control at scale. While automation jobs and workflows help execute changes, they fall short in maintaining a trusted, real-time understanding of system state. Over time, drift, loss of context and fragmented processes increase operational risk and cost. The key challenge is not executing change, but ensuring systems remain aligned with intended state under constant change. A modern operating model must link execution with ongoing validation, enabling teams to detect drift early, maintain compliance and act with confidence. Chef 360 addresses this gap by combining automation with operational context, giving teams a continuous, reliable view of infrastructure posture across environments. This shifts operations from tracking past actions to maintaining real-time operational confidence.

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Modernize Automation Without Rip and Replace: How Chef 360 Can Help

Modernizing IT doesn’t have to mean ripping and replacing existing systems. As complexity from cloud, AI and compliance grows, teams need a more practical approach that builds on what already works. Progress Chef 360 enables this shift by letting teams reuse existing automation, gain unified visibility, enforce compliance and scale efficiently. With AI-powered capabilities, it helps organisations evolve their infrastructure steadily - without disruption or unnecessary overhead.

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The Pathway to a New World Skills Validation Program

About a year ago, I talked about how we were going to refresh the Chef Certification program, and the need to update it to match our modernised product line up.  Since then a lot has happened, both at Chef Software and in the world in general.

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Learn Chef in a Whole New Way

Today at ChefConf Online we took the wraps off Learn Chef, our new online learning platform for the Chef community. Three years ago we launched Learn Chef Rally, which brought together our online training in a single, no-cost offering.

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10 Years of DevOps

10 years of DevOps? That’s a bit of a controversial title, but Jody Wolfborn and I have just returned from speaking at the 10th Anniversary DevOpsDays in Ghent, Belgium.

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Chef Certification Refresh

In the past 6 months, Chef has taken a number of big steps forward as we modernize our automation solutions including the announcement of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack, the new versions of Chef Infra, Chef InSpec and Chef Habitat, and a shift to 100% Open Source software.

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