OpsWorks

Introduction

• Managed Chef, Puppet for resources in the same region.

• Good for migrating when Chef / Puppet are already in use

• An alternative to AWS SSM

• If needs a deeper infrastructure control, use CloudFormation instead.

Feature

• For configuration, deployment, management with IaC

• Chef uses Recipes of Cookbooks to configure instances.

  • Stack (per top-level application)

  • Layer (1+ instnaces, can create more layers if need to separate modules)

  • Custom Recipe (per database)

• Puppet uses manifests.

• Supports auto-healing for resources.

• Options for managing Linux Security Updates

  • Create new instances to replace current instances.

  • On Linux-based instances in Chef 11.10 or older stacks, run the Update Dependencies stack command.

• Elastic Beanstalk vs CloudFormation vs OpsWorks vs CodeDeploy

• OpsWorks Stacks provides 3 ways to manage the number of server instances.

  • 24/7 instances are started manually and run until they are manually stopped.

  • Time-based instances are automatically started and stopped by AWS OpsWorks Stacks on a user-specified schedule.

  • Load-based instances are automatically started and stopped by AWS OpsWorks Stacks when they cross a threshold for a user-specified load metric such as CPU or memory utilization.