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Ops code Summit takeaways

Overall product roadmap
The server is being rewritten in Erlang (no longer ruby) for .11 to greatly reduce memory usage and CPU usage.  There's a large push for scalability as Opscode uses the same code base on just 6 servers to do Hosted Chef
CouchDB is being replaced with MySQL as the data store to improve db response time, performance, and ease replication/maintenance
.11 will ship with DB plugins for multiple SQL servers.  No word on if they may support MS SQL at some point.  I will follow up with their product manager to express our interest in this use case

Windows product roadmap
.10.6 comes out next week with significant fixes for Windows support
All future releases will ship on all platforms the same day
The MSI is their preferred route for manual installation, but knife bootstrap is preferred
The next release includes daemon support for the client which will reduce CPU usage and load time since ruby will stay in memory
The reworked the security model and are extending that to provide Windows style ACL support to all providers where permissions  could be used
They are working on a cookbook to handle joining systems to a domain
They bragged that the IIS cookbook was just extended significantly.  I wonder who did that...
No one in the discussion was trying to do a from scratch Windows install to prod system currently.  Everyone utilized WDS or custom AMIs in EC2

Workflow Lessons
Ops code recommends not to use a complex multiserver / multi repository setup
Most users in the discussion were using a server for prod / preproduction and a server for lab / QA.  Most users heavily utilized environments and versions
We are not the only organization that is struggling to come up with an effective workflow.  No one seemed to have a perfect solution
Opscode sees cookbooks you download as "library" cookbooks that should not be modified and should be installed via the knife site download feature
There's a general consensus that actions in knife need to better work into change management workflows, but no one could exactly agree on how that should be implemented.  One idea was utilizing cookbook versions, freezing cookbooks, and post git commit hooks, but that still doesn't capture all change

Training / Documentation
They have a big focus internally on improving their wiki
They will be offering their training PDFs in a more editable format in the future, but offered to email us the Keynote files so we can edit them (everyone at Opscode uses a Mac)
There is a Ops focused Chef book coming out next spring/summer by the author of the previous Dev focused Chef book
They were very receptive to the idea of short webcast style training on specific subjects and we spent a lot of time as a group talking about good subjects for those webcasts
Everyone hates the community cookbook site as much as us and they are focusing on improving it.  I gave lots of feedback on this.