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AWS OpsWorks

Score4.3 out of 10

12 Reviews and Ratings

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What is AWS OpsWorks?

AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about AWS OpsWorks.
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Great tool in general, but deprecated and EOL soon.

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Opsworks is one of the main orchestration system we use for creating AWS services and connecting between them.

We've been using Opsworks for nearly 8 years and it has successfully allowed us to build and host infrastructure for large Drupal websites.

Pros

  • connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
  • easy configuration management deployment via Chef

Cons

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

Return on Investment

  • very quick way of creating new infrastructure
  • low maintenance costs
  • easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs

Alternatives Considered

AWS Systems Manager

Other Software Used

AWS Systems Manager, HashiCorp Terraform

Good for simple stacks and getting going with AWS + Chef

Incentivized
Andrew RainesView profile
Backend Software Engineer in Information Technology at 10 Digital Media Limited (1-10 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • OpsWorks has allowed some of our more simple application stacks to be implemented quickly and effectively. Whilst it is difficult to put actual numbers on it, it meant we could hit the ground running before tackling the more complex world of Cloudformation/Terraform to manage parts of our infrastructure.

Alternatives Considered

Terraform and Cloudformation

A powerful/stable infrastructure management tool, but a bit outdated

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

DigitalOcean, Google App Engine and Heroku Platform

Other Software Used

Heroku Platform, Google App Engine, Microsoft Visual Studio Code