AWS OpsWorks

1. AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

• Core Function: Provides a fully managed, single-tenant Chef Automate server on an EC2 instance. Chef Automate is a comprehensive suite that includes tools for compliance, visibility, and workflow management.

• Management: AWS handles the creation, patching, configuration, and maintenance of the Chef server.

• Features:

  • Includes premium features of the Chef Automate platform like Chef Workflow, Chef Visibility, and Chef Compliance.

  • Manages both Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers running Linux or Windows.

  • Automates server health monitoring, security, and OS updates.

  • Supports automatic backups to a specified S3 bucket.

2. AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

• Core Function: Provides a fully managed Puppet Enterprise master server on an EC2 instance. Puppet is a configuration management tool that helps you define the state of your infrastructure using its declarative language.

• Management: AWS manages the Puppet master server, but you retain control over the underlying EC2 resources.

• Features:

  • Automates updates during a weekly maintenance window, with automatic rollback if issues are detected.

  • Allows configuration of automatic backups for your Puppet master, stored in an S3 bucket.

  • New nodes can be automatically registered to the Puppet master by inserting a user-data script into an Auto Scaling group.

  • Uses a secure SSL-based communication protocol with a certificate approval process.

3. AWS OpsWorks Stacks

OpsWorks Stacks is the original OpsWorks service. It provides a simple and flexible way to create and manage applications and servers on AWS and on-premises. While it uses Chef for configuration, it has its own unique model and terminology.

Core Concepts of OpsWorks Stacks

• Stack: The top-level container for your environment. It defines the AWS region, VPC, IAM roles, and other default settings for all resources within it.

• Layer: A blueprint for a set of EC2 instances. Each layer serves a specific purpose (e.g., web server, database, load balancer) and defines the instance settings, installed packages, security groups, and recipes to be run.

• Instance: A compute resource, which can be an Amazon EC2 instance or an on-premises server registered with the stack. OpsWorks Stacks supports three types of EC2 instances:

  • 24/7: Instances that are started manually and run until you stop them.

  • Time-based: Instances that are automatically started and stopped by OpsWorks Stacks on a defined daily and weekly schedule, ideal for predictable traffic patterns.

  • Load-based: Instances that are automatically scaled up or down based on specified load metrics (like CPU or memory). This is available only for Linux-based stacks.

• App: Represents an application to be deployed. It contains information about the application's source code repository (e.g., Git, S3) and deployment instructions.

• Cookbooks and Recipes: OpsWorks Stacks uses standard Chef cookbooks and recipes (written in Ruby) to define configuration tasks, such as installing packages, creating directories, and configuring services.

OpsWorks Stacks Lifecycle Events

A key feature of OpsWorks Stacks is its lifecycle events model, which automatically triggers Chef recipes in response to changes in your stack. There are five lifecycle events:

1. Setup: Occurs on a new instance right after it successfully boots. Used for initial instance configuration.

2. Configure: Occurs on all instances in the stack whenever an instance enters or leaves the online state. This is useful for updating configurations (like a web server's list of app servers) across the entire layer.

3. Deploy: Occurs when you run a "Deploy" command for an app. This event triggers the recipes that deploy the application code to the instances in a layer.

4. Undeploy: Occurs when you delete an app from a stack. This runs recipes to remove the app and clean up its configurations.

5. Shutdown: Occurs when you stop an instance, just before the instance begins to shut down. This is useful for graceful shutdowns, such as draining connections or backing up data.

Monitoring and Security

• OpsWorks Stacks sends all resource metrics to Amazon CloudWatch.

• All API calls made to OpsWorks are logged by AWS CloudTrail.

• Access and permissions are managed at the stack level through IAM, allowing you to grant users specific permissions for different stacks.