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Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

artsy.github.io

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Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#2

Post by chasb »

Being able to roll your own level/complexity of devops is fantastic. The next step is to bring this functionality to high-compliance users, like banks and healthcare providers.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#3

Post by mattjaynes »

OpsWorks is a nice convenience on AWS and is implemented with the Chef configuration management tool (provided by Opscode, the company behind Chef, hence the name).

Shameless plug:

If you know you should be using a configuration management tool, but haven't picked one yet, I'll be releasing a book on Wednesday Sept 4th just for you.

The book is called "Taste Test" and compares Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible.

In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with.

I definitely had some big surprises when writing the book. Spoiler: Ansible was by far the simplest, easiest to understand, and quickest to get up and going.

To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#4

Post by timdorr »

OpsWorks is great. We were also on Heroku and were planning on the DIY route with Puppet. My coworker spent 2-3 weeks working on that setup and was 90% of the way there.

Then he found out about OpsWorks. We had our apps deployed in a single day and migrated over by the end of the week. There was a bit of learning to deal with Chef, but it was an overall smooth experience.

We've linked it up to Codeship and now we simply push to Github, Codeship runs our test suite, and they run a rake task to initiate a deploy via OpsWorks. Ever since Codeship made some serious optimizations in the past week, our time from git push to deploy is about 5 minutes. Awesome!

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#6

Post by vosper »

mattjaynes wrote: post #3

OpsWorks is a nice convenience on AWS and is implemented with the Chef configuration management tool (provided by Opscode, the company behind Chef, hence the name). Shameless plug: If you know you should be using a configuration management tool, but haven't picked one yet, I'll be releasing a book on Wednesday Sept 4th just for you. The book is called "Taste Test" and compares Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible. In the…

This is awesome, I'm eager to check out your book; in-depth side-by-side comparisons are something that's missing from way too many technology discussions.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#7

Post by skyebook »

timdorr wrote: post #4

OpsWorks is great. We were also on Heroku and were planning on the DIY route with Puppet. My coworker spent 2-3 weeks working on that setup and was 90% of the way there. Then he found out about OpsWorks. We had our apps deployed in a single day and migrated over by the end of the week. There was a bit of learning to deal with Chef, but it was an overall smooth experience. We've linked it up to Codeship and now we sim…

Similarly good experiences with setting up custom recipes that don't use the built in 'App' stack (which provides Rails, Node, and some others).

I was able to go from the 'tinkering at 2am' level of ruby experience to making Chef do my bidding in setting up alternative apt-repos, deploying config files, etc in a day or two.

My one gripe, as with the rest of AWS, is that they seem more interested in MySQL than Postgres. The opsworks cookbook repo has an included mysql cookbook as well as a preconfigured "App" layer, nothing for Postgres besides forum responses to go the DIY route.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#8

Post by joeya »

mattjaynes wrote: post #3

OpsWorks is a nice convenience on AWS and is implemented with the Chef configuration management tool (provided by Opscode, the company behind Chef, hence the name). Shameless plug: If you know you should be using a configuration management tool, but haven't picked one yet, I'll be releasing a book on Wednesday Sept 4th just for you. The book is called "Taste Test" and compares Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible. In the…

I've heard a little about Ansible but look forward to learning more. I'm in awe that you took the time to get up to speed on each of those tools. Some of the learning curves are... intimidating.

For what it's worth, I actually found OpsWorks' usage of Chef to be more intuitive than Opscode's own. OpsWorks relies on "events" (setup, deploy, shutdown, etc.) that trigger (i.e., push) recipes to be applied to instances. Opscode, at least in its typical architecture, relies on clients pulling configuration from a Chef server at a regular interval.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#9

Post by danso »

First, some pedantry: I love Artsy's writeups but I'm really surprised at why they use that purple for their body text color. Every time I read their engineering blog, I use the web inspector to change the color to #222...and the purple actually looks great as an accent (for links)...I might have to rip off that color scheme for my own blog.

/pedantry

I'm kind of surprised I hadn't heard of OpsWorks before, but I guess that's just a testament to how many things AWS is rolling out...this seems like the best fit for my needs, after having struggled with EBS and rolling my own EC2 deploys. But I have to really commend Artsy's team for not just sharing their experiences, but doing it in such a presentable way...The OP links to the AWS documentation, which looks like this:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/working...

It's standard Amazon documentation style, which for me, has always been too fragmented (look at all those nested menu items you have to click through) with uninspired layout and typography to boot (i.e. 100% width for the body text)

Even if I had seen the AWS info on OpsWorks, I probably would've skipped the docs. Artsy's explanation and presentation of the concepts is just fantastic and so readable...hopefully Amazon rips off from Artsy's blog as well.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#10

Post by gingerlime »

mattjaynes wrote: post #3

OpsWorks is a nice convenience on AWS and is implemented with the Chef configuration management tool (provided by Opscode, the company behind Chef, hence the name). Shameless plug: If you know you should be using a configuration management tool, but haven't picked one yet, I'll be releasing a book on Wednesday Sept 4th just for you. The book is called "Taste Test" and compares Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible. In the…

sounds interesting. I was reading some great things about ansible and am keen to give it a try. However, reading about AWS Opswork makes me wonder if it's better to stick to chef, even if it's not as easy. If Opsworks picks up, chef's likely to become the gold standard. I'm curious to know your take on this?
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