As I write this, I’m wrapping up my visit to ChefConf 2012, the inaugural user conference for the very popular Chef open source server configuration automation tool, where it was announced that over the last four years and 54 stable releases, more than 715 contributors have added their code to the pot. And with around 400 Chef users in attendance, you can imagine that most of the conversation revolved around the rising uptake of DevOps methodologies.

In addition to the Chef feature release and 1,000,000-download landmark that we discussed here, Opscode – the self-described steward of the Chef project – announced more training, a streamlined code submission process, and generally more community outreach. The problem, as Opscode Chief Community Manager Jesse Robbins put it, is scaling a community that’s growing at an exponential rate.

And on the subject of community, the atmosphere at ChefConf reminded me a lot of that at last month’s OpenStack Summit – a large group of enthusiastic hackers and coders gathering to swap tips and best practices. But unlike OpenStack, Chef is inarguably an enterprise-ready, provenly mature project with plenty of enterprise adoption (In fairness, OpenStack is two years younger and far more ambitious).

Opscode CTO Christopher Brown affirms that the line between DevOps and a traditional sysadmin is pretty fuzzy in the age of the cloud (is an administrator who spends their day scripting in DevOps?) – but there were over 100 sign-ups for Chef workshops earlier in the week, and conference organizers had to turn people away, which show that “agile development” and “infrastructure as code” are mantras that aren’t going away.

That was also very much evidenced in the customer stories during the conference keynote sessions. John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity for family history search engine Ancestry.com, explained that his team uses Chef, in conjunction with tools like Go for release management, to really deliver on the promise of continuous deployment, with code going from check-in to deployment in 30 minutes. And, it’s worth noting, that’s on bare metal Microsoft Windows servers, which isn’t exactly a typical Chef use-case.

But Esser says that the technology is one thing, but that he sees his job as far more cultural. To use his own comic book metaphor, developers see themselves as Superman, unstoppable and always right. Operations staff see themselves as Batman, doing what they need to without always getting the praise they deserve. Esser says that together, they’re the World’s Finest, but it’s just a matter of getting the two to see eye to eye.

Once DevOps methodologies were implemented, he started to see developers owning their services “from cradle to grave,” with the teams following through on the promise of continually delivering new code.

It was a sentiment echoed by CycleCloud CEO Jason Stowe, who gave a talk on how his company helped run a 50,000-core supercomputer on Amazon Web Services for four hours, at a cost of less than $5,000 per hour, with the help of Chef and DevOps methodologies. Thanks to the fact that Chef scripting is simple Ruby, Stowe says that his developers were able to move to the infrastructure side of things quickly and easily, which is important when scaling for an HPC cluster in the cloud.

So yes, the conference was theoretically for Chef, and there was plenty of talk about the tool itself, but the real takeaway here is that DevOps methodologies are only seeing more adoption, and enterprises are seeing real benefit – and that it’s more about the culture than it is the code.