We currently use AWS OpsWorks in hosting our application core. It forms the foundation of our product, which is used by the entire company; however, only a few select members of our backend team manage it directly. AWS OpsWorks allows us to leverage the powerful EC2 infrastructure without having to build out a custom instance management system.
Pros
OpsWorks provides a relatively simple interface for connecting with the ELB and bringing up/taking down EC2 instances.
OpsWorks stacks and layers allow you to logically organize your infrastructure to match your system architecture.
OpsWorks can assist in monitoring instance health and has a decent auto-scaling feature to recover from potential load-based outages.
Cons
Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.
Likelihood to Recommend
Scenarios where OpsWorks is well suited:
<ul><li>You have a team that's heavily invested in AWS infrastructure and want to simplify the management of your EC2 instances.</li><li>You have a large proficient DevOps team and you're willing to put into the time to learn Chef and dig deep into operations management.</li></ul>Scenarios where OpsWorks is less appropriate:
<ul><li>You don't have a proficient DevOps team or development team that is able to dedicate a considerable amount of time to learn Chef and get your instances configured.</li><li>You want to build an application that is infrastructure-agnostic that can easily be moved to different hosting on short notice.</li></ul>
We currently use Opsworks to help orchestrate parts of our infrastructure and manage instances via Chef recipes. It is used for the majority of the backend services we produce. It gives us a framework around which to hang our applications and an easy way to rebuild servers, auto-scale services and do basic monitoring.
Pros
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
Cons
There are no true deployment options, so you cannot specify rolling-deploys for example. It is possible to emulate some of these things, but it really is an exercise for the reader.
Generally pushes you down the road of mutable infrastructure (as opposed to immutable infrastructure). It would be nice if there were better options around this.
Likelihood to Recommend
Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.
