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Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

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Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#21

Post by miles932 »

skyebook wrote: post #7
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 Postgre…

On the PostgreSQL note, here's a whitepaper I helped with that enumerates best practices for it on AWS: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_RDBMS_PostgreSQL.pdf

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#22

Post by miles932 »

AsymetricCom wrote: post #19

This sounds very similar to the types of tools Obama used for his campaign. It's nice to see such tools are now available to the everyman w/o having to invest in a team of operational specialists. http://www.williamhertling.com/2013/07/printable-obama-for-a...

see the original here: http://awsofa.info The OFA team used Puppet, CloudFormation, furious typing in boto and the CLI, and later added a healthy helping of Netflix's Asgard system for system mgmt.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#23

Post by AsymetricCom »

miles932 wrote: post #22
AsymetricCom wrote: post #19

This sounds very similar to the types of tools Obama used for his campaign. It's nice to see such tools are now available to the everyman w/o having to invest in a team of operational specialists. http://www.williamhertling.com/2013/07/printable-obama-for-a...

see the original here: http://awsofa.info The OFA team used Puppet, CloudFormation, furious typing in boto and the CLI, and later added a healthy helping of Netflix's Asgard system for system mgmt.

There was an article that goes more in depth than this infographic, but I haven't found it. I think it's originally from Wired print.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#24

Post by skyebook »

miles932 wrote: post #21
skyebook wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Postgre…

On the PostgreSQL note, here's a whitepaper I helped with that enumerates best practices for it on AWS: http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_RDBMS_PostgreSQL.pdf

Please allow me to give an emphatic THANK YOU for writing that... I've gone to it more than once in the short while its been floating around and it has generally been helpful in either giving me some conviction in what I'm doing or righting my ways. Unfortunately, and this drives me nuts about so many PaaS offerings, maintaining a database at scale is a really niche thing that people devote tons of time to.. Arguably many times more difficult than keeping a bunch of app servers up.. I would love to see more hosted offerings along the line of EnterpriseDB and Heroku's Postgres service.

Thanks again for the awesome resource :)

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#25

Post by mnutt »

Does anyone know if anyone is working on a standalone version of an event-based system for Chef? I'm not on AWS, but I think an event-based system similar to OpsWorks might have a nice fit between chef-solo and chef-server.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#26

Post by xorgar831 »

After having used Chef on a project, I've found it to be really a clueless train-wreck of a product that they got their buddies in the USA NW to use. The basis of their approach is that they have no clue what you're doing, because every one's environment is different, so they just leave it up to you how you want to do everything. Yet the whole value in such a product is enforcing good factorization, implementation and maintainability. If you let something like this lose on your Fortune 500 you're just going to have a pile of flakey, inconstant and convoluted and unmaintainable DSL crap doing all sorts of random stuff... and that's being kind to the product IMO.

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#28

Post by ZoFreX »

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'm curious - why didn't you include CF-Engine?

Re: Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

#29

Post by joeya »

mnutt wrote: post #25

Does anyone know if anyone is working on a standalone version of an event-based system for Chef? I'm not on AWS, but I think an event-based system similar to OpsWorks might have a nice fit between chef-solo and chef-server.

Hey mnutt, I agree--it's a nice model. Scalarium was building such a product, but Amazon bought them and made it OpsWorks :)
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