Introduction to AWS OpsWorks | Hacker News Reader

Introduction to AWS OpsWorks

artsy.github.io

91 pointsjoeya28 comments

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...

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.

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.

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?

I've been recommending and using Puppet and Chef for years. However, the new generation of tools like Ansible and Salt are miles ahead in terms of usability.

Ansible in particular makes it easy to be up and going in a matter of minutes where some of the other tools literally take days. So, if you're on the fence, I'd try Ansible first, then if for some reason it's not working for you, then consider Chef.

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

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!

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.

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 :)

This is a 13-minute demo of AWS Opsworks (I am the author, and I work for AWS): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TtiSJSbHo&feature=youtu.be

I hope you'll find it useful.

edit: thanks for updating to chef 11!

Chef 11 support was announced recently: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/07/aws-opsworks-update-custo...

Thanks for this. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before. At least all the time spent trying to learn Chef is not completely wasted.

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.

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 :)

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.

are they still using an ancient version of chef? trying to backport community cookbooks was an exercise in frustration

They were originally using an older version, but Chef 11 is now supported. I believe it's the default for new stacks, and old ones can be updated from the stack settings page.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/07/24/aws-ops...

thank god. that was the only dealbreaker for me. thanks for the article by the way! and the free wine on fridays

Last week I wrote a blog post on OpsWorks deployment from the command line and via Codeship. The article is here: http://novoit.eu/blog/02-deploying-code-to-amazon-opsworks-u...

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.

If @joeyAghion doesn't get to it first, we will gladly take a PR to change the color! Our blog repo is public here: https://github.com/artsy/artsy.github.com/tree/source

Thanks for the kind words! To be honest, I have to agree with you about the text color. Will fix.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com