AWS OpsWorks vs. CLUSTERS

AWS Opsworks is good for linking AWS services and setting up and maintaining webservers using Chef. However, it will become EOL soon so we would not recommend starting new projects using it and instead go for the recommended Systems Manager setup

Incentivized

• The interface is quite intuitive and allows you to discover and easily find what you want to do and what other features are within OpsWorks.
• Chef integration is pretty seamless and there are a good set of options and operating systems to choose from
• It makes things like auto scaling set up, either via load or time, more straight forward and intuitive than what you'd typically see via the EC2 console

Incentivized

• integrating with newer AWS services (ie. ALB)
• keeping up with Chef releases (ie. locked at 12 currently)

Incentivized

Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.

Incentivized

OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.

Incentivized

• OpsWorks allowed us to access the AWS infrastructure with a considerably lower time investment than we would have otherwise needed when we first implemented it.
• Since we've been running with OpsWorks we've experienced very little downtime and it's required relatively little maintenance.
• The main downside of using OpsWorks for us is that it has locked us into a very specific infrastructure that doesn't have the flexibility of many of the newer infrastructure management tools, this may lead to a painful migration down the road. We also run a risk of long outage if it ever does introduce breaking changes as the skillset needed to work with the OpsWorks tooling is very specific not widely available in our company.

Incentivized