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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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 :)

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