Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmickey | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why Opsworks is not getting more love?

I guess people don't like Chef? Opsworks has enabled hassle free deployments for us over the past three years or so at no additional cost. :)

View on HN

Yep, not sure where this perception of "nobody's using it" comes from but I have been using it in 2 different companies in the last 3 years as well with nothing but love. In fact, if it were the case that "nobody's using it for good reasons", maybe we should ought to know the reasons?

Been using opsworks for about a year now and while it has very significantly streamlined our provisioning/deployment tasks, "nothing but love" is not quite how I'd describe it.

It does have some warts.

Biggest wart we have is that it randomly picks a machine to run migrations on, if it's a deploy with migrations.

You could code up something in the deploy hook to select the master node (mostly the first instance in the layer) to run migrations and you could disable the "Run Migrations" when you deploy. I do this for the Rails app in my company.

I actually solved this with our custom deploy script. We choose the machine that runs the migrations.

The necessity of building and maintaining a custom deploy script is the biggest wart for us (though I admit that the API is pretty good, and said script has not had that much maintenance overhead).

Those of use contributing on the Guide so far have generally been companies where it's not used. I'd love to see a contribution (a few bullet points and/or links) that better covers the basics and reflects how/when it's useful.

https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws/issues/123

Please write an update and submit a PR. I'm moving from Ansible to Chef and would love some real world advice on what Opsworks has to offer me without another dreaded POC.

It's likely the original authors aren't using Chef or just use Chef server as I do now.

Yes, true. At the moment we don't have any OpsWorks expert contributors. Hope one of you can change that! https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws/issues/123

What's made you move away from Ansible?

What advantage does Opswork have for deployments over CodeDeploy?

You could add more background on it into the guide. Just submit a PR! :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com