Intro to AWS OpsWorks for the Rails Developer

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks features an integrated management experience for the entire application lifecycle including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, monitoring, and access control. It will work with applications of any level of complexity and is independent of any particular architectural pattern.

Wat?

Configure instances
Automate provisioning
Deploy app

How it fits in the AWS ecosystem:

tl; dr - like EngineYard but less opaque **

Why?

Similar surface area to EngineYard. For the developer with EY experience, there are potential pros and cons of switching a production application to OW.

Pros

EY + more flexibility and control
Cheaper than EY: roughly $1k/month + %10 ... for same instances + AWS Business-level support
Additional features like auto-healing and auto-scaling
More easily virtualizable **

Cons

More control => more responsibility
Usage Gotchas? unknown
Learning curve/How to? (snapshots, security updates, ssh keys, etc)
Quality of Support? unknown
Maintenance effort? unknown

Vocabulary

Stacks
Layers (like Chef roles)
Instances
Apps
Cookbooks
Lifecycle Events

Basic App

Multiple layers

Load Balancing

Overview

Dashboard

Base Cookbooks

Customize with custom cookbooks and json

Anatomy of a custom cookbook repo

Example custom chef json

{
  "deploy": {
    "simple-php": {
      "application_type": "php",
      "document_root": "web",
      "scm": {
        "scm_type": "git",
        "repository": "dev/simple-php"
      },
      "memcached": {},
      "database": {
        "host": "10.10.10.20",
        "database": "simple-php",
        "username": "root",
        "password": "correcthorsebatterystaple",
        "reconnect": true
      }
    }
  },
  "mysql": {
    "server_root_password": "correcthorsebatterystaple",
    "tunable": {"innodb_buffer_pool_size": "256M"}
  },
  "opsworks": {
    "layers": {
      "php-app": {
        "instances": {
          "php-app1": {"private-ip": "10.10.10.10"}
        }
      },
      "db-master": {
        "instances": {
          "db-master1": {"private-ip": "10.10.10.20"}
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "opsworks_custom_cookbooks": {
    "enabled": true,
    "scm": {
      "repository": "ops/cookbooks"
    }
  }
}