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).<p>Shameless plug:<p>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.<p>The book is called "Taste Test" and compares Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible.<p>In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with.<p>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.<p>To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: <a href="http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-ansible.html" rel="nofollow">http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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!
This is a 13-minute demo of AWS Opsworks (I am the author, and I work for AWS):
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TtiSJSbHo&feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_TtiSJSbHo&feature=youtu.be</a><p>I hope you'll find it useful.
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.
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.
Last week I wrote a blog post on OpsWorks deployment from the command line and via Codeship. The article is here: <a href="http://novoit.eu/blog/02-deploying-code-to-amazon-opsworks-using-codeship" rel="nofollow">http://novoit.eu/blog/02-deploying-code-to-amazon-opsworks-u...</a>
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 <i>great</i> as an accent (for links)...I might have to rip off that color scheme for my own blog.<p>/pedantry<p>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 <i>presentable</i> way...The OP links to the AWS documentation, which looks like this:<p><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/workingapps.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/working...</a><p>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)<p>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.
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.<p><a href="http://www.williamhertling.com/2013/07/printable-obama-for-america-aws.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.williamhertling.com/2013/07/printable-obama-for-a...</a>