Advanced Topics - Session 2 - Introducing AWS OpsWorks

Thomas Metschke

Introducing AWS OpsWorks

Technical Program Manager

Once upon a time…

Making Donuts

1. Make dough

2. Roll and cut the dough

3. Separate donuts from holes

4. Let the dough rise

5. Prepare the glaze

6. Frying time!

7. Let them dry

8. Apply glaze

9. Add sprinkles (optional)

Source: http://www.mixph.com/2008/10/how-to-make-donuts-food-business.html

Recipes + Automation

Eric Joyner ericjoyner.com

Introducing AWS OpsWorks

• Integrated application management solution for ops-

minded developers and IT admins

• Model, control and automate applications of nearly any

scale and complexity

• AWS Management Console, SDKs, or CLI

• No additional cost

Why Use AWS OpsWorks?

SIMPLE

Easy to use, quick to get started and productive

PRODUCTIVE

Reduces errors with conventions and scripted configuration

FLEXIBLE

Simplifies deployments of any scale and complexity

POWERFUL

Reduces cost and time with automation

SECURE

Enables control with fine grained permissions

Improve productivity

• Scalable infrastructure

• Flexible architecture

• Deploy often

• Staging environments

AWS OpsWorks gives us the tools we need to automate operations. We can scale Monster World, one of the largest Facebook games, to millions of users without ever needing more than two backend developers.

Jesper Richter-Reichhelm head of engineering

Rik Heywood

CTO at WorkFu

Basic Layers

• HAProxy

– Minor config changes as our site uses https for everything

• PHP App Server

– Customized Apache config and PHP.ini using template overrides

• MySQL

– We also install scripts to backup the database via custom recipes.

Additional layers that share App instances

• Memcached Layer

– Allows us to deploy memcached onto any instance

– We auto install it on all PHP instances to use spare memory

• Queue Worker Layer

– Processes messages in our background task queue.

– Again, we install one worker worker on all PHP instances.

– Helps to scale queue throughput as traffic increases

– We can still deploy dedicated queue worker instances if we need to

Layers sharing database instance

• RabbitMQ Layer

– We queue up a lot of background tasks, such as querying the Twitter API, rebuilding

the search database, sending out notifications to users etc.

• Sphinx Layer

– A full text search engine.

• Both services place very little load on the instance.

– If load on either of these, or MySQL, gets too high, we can easily migrate them to

dedicated instances.

Other features we depend on…

• Simple one click deployment

– Could be automated on push via API, but we prefer manual control of this.

• A realistic staging / testing environment

– Cloned our stack to create an identical duplicate of it

– Same cluster and config on Production and Staging

– We can leave Staging switched off most of the time, saving cash.

• No long complicated out of date documents explaining how to set up server

instances - it's all automated and in our git repository.

AWS Application Management Services

Elastic Beanstalk OpsWorks CloudFormation EC2

Convenience Control

Higher-level Services Do it yourself

The heart of AWS OpsWorks

14

Agent on each EC2 instance

OpsWorks talks with

The heart of AWS OpsWorks

15

understands a set of commands that are triggered by OpsWorks. The agent then runs a Chef solo run.

Agent on each EC2 instance

Instance lifecycle commands

Enough talking

DEMO TIME

Improve reliability

Git

Code

Jenkins

Build Test

OpsWorks

Provision Deploy Monitor

What’s next for AWS OpsWorks?

• Deeper integration with AWS resources (e.g., ELB)

• More built-in layers

• Advanced VPC integration (beyond today’s support for the

default VPC)

• And more!

• Please give us your feedback in the OpsWorks forums.

Thank You!

For more information, please visit us at

https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks

Thomas Metschke

@tmetschke