AWS OpsWorksMmik Huang

Stacks (AWS resources—Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic IP addresses)

Layers (application inside the instance)

Instances

Apps (application outside the instance, control in repository [manual,auto])

Customizing your Stack (set scenario for Setup, Configure, Deploy, Undeploy , Shutdown)

Resource Management (control EIP, EBS resource)

Security and Permissions (IAM)

Monitoring and Logging (Cloudwatch, CloudTrial)

OpsWorks Overview

A Stack is the highest-level container. It groups custom configuration and houses one or more applications.

Each stack has one or more Layers. Think of these as definitions for different server roles. A simple static web site might have a single Nginx layer. A typical web application might instead have a load-balancer layer, a Rails layer, and a MySQL layer. OpsWorks defines plenty of built-in layers (for Rails, HAProxy, PHP, Node, Memcached, MySQL, etc.), but you can also define your own.

Applications are your code, sourced from a git or subversion repository, an S3 bucket, or even an external web site. A typical Rails site might have a single application defined, but you can define multiple applications if you’d like to configure, scale, and monitor them together.

Finally, we define Instances and assign each to one or more layers. These are the EC2 servers themselves. You can start instances manually, or configure them to start and stop on a schedule or in response to load patterns.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use application management service for building web apps and web services with popular application containers such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and .NET. 

 AWS OpsWorks is a higher level service that focuses on providing highly productive and reliable DevOps experiences for IT administrators and ops-minded developers. 

AWS CloudFormation is a building block service that enables customers to provision and manage almost any AWS resource via a JSON-based domain specific language.Customers define templates and use them to provision and manage AWS resources, operating systems and application code.

IAM Integration with other AWS services

You might be noticing a theme here: OpsWorks leverages AWS’s other tools and services quite a bit.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows you to define individual user accounts within an umbrella account for your organization. These users can be authorized for varying levels of access to your OpsWorks stacks. From the Permissions view of each stack, you can then grant them SSH and sudo rights on an individual basis.

Cost

Pricing is simple and enticing. There’s no charge for using OpsWorks; you pay only for your underlying usage of other AWS resources like EC2 instances, S3 storage, bandwidth, elastic IPs, etc. If you’ve purchased reserved instances, those savings will apply as usual.

Unfortunately, OpsWorks doesn’t yet support spot instances 

FAQ Q: What can users do with AWS OpsWorks that they could not do before?

AWS OpsWorks provides pre-defined layers for common technologies such as Ruby, PHP, HAProxy, Memcached, and MySQL

AWS OpsWorks supports Chef recipes (see What is Chef and how does AWS OpsWorks use it for details), you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr

You can benefit from automatic failover, package management, Amazon EBS volume RAID setup, and automatic rule-based or time-based instance scaling. With AWS OpsWorks there is no need to log in to several machines and manually update your configuration. Whenever your environment changes, AWS OpsWorks updates your configuration.

Q: Are there any limits to AWS OpsWorks? By default, you can create up to 20 Stacks, and each stack can hold up to 20 layers, 20

instances, and 20 apps. You should also be aware of other AWS limits.

Q: What software versioning and revision control systems does AWS OpsWorks support? AWS OpsWorks can retrieve the code you want to deploy from common version control

systems like Git and Subversion as well as HTTP and private or public S3 bundles.

FAQ Q: Can I use my own AMIs?

Yes, you can use your own AMIs  or customize the AMIs OpsWorks supports using Chef scripts to install agents and other software that you require.

Q: Can I use Amazon EC2 user data to customize instance setup?

No, instance setup is done exclusively through Chef recipes

Q: What software versioning and revision control systems does AWS OpsWorks support?

AWS OpsWorks can retrieve the code you want to deploy from common version control systems like Git and Subversion as well as HTTP and private or public S3 bundles.