AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
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Perforce Puppet
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Puppet Enteprise is an IT automation and configuration management solution that enables users to manage and automate infrastructure and complex workflows. The vendor states Puppet Enterprise combines both model‑based and task-based capabilities in a way that enables organizations to scale their multi-cloud infrastructure as their automation footprint grows, with more flexibility from both agent-based and agentless capabilities.
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Pricing
AWS OpsWorks
Perforce Puppet
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS OpsWorks
Perforce Puppet
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS OpsWorks
Perforce Puppet
Considered Both Products
AWS OpsWorks
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose AWS OpsWorks
Opsworks will become EOL soon and we have been using the recommended Systems Manager solution recently which offers a lot more flexibility in terms of orchestration technology (ie. higher Chef versions) and easier to integrate with even more AWS services.
We first got up and running with OpsWorks about 6~7 years ago, at a time when many of its competitors were far more limited. At the time it made sense as the logical tool to go with and getting up and running on the AWS infrastructure was beneficial for the scale we were …
OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the …
As I mentioned before Ansible is a great tool. There is no question about it. It has very simple syntax (YAML), is very easy to learn, and is scalable as well. But the only thing that ansible lacked at that time was the actual agent that have to go into each server. Ansible …
Puppet was selected before I joined the team, had it been my choice I would have much rather went with Chef as it has the ability to do things that Puppet has not yet added to their system such a the ability to quickly query what host currently are allowing puppet to maintain …
I have not used any other Configuration Management System since cfengine back in about 2007 so I have little current input on alternatives to Puppet having never used them, though Chef seems to have gained some traction as has Ansible.
We have used SaltStack by proxy of utilizing Ceph since it uses SaltStack to automate configuration changes to it's cluster. I found it easy to use however extremely limiting when it comes to scale as its not a proper language with a central data store like Hiera. We plan to …
HPSA is a licensed product and incurs significant upfront investment costs due to COTS licensing. Puppet Data Center Automation has a significantly lower upfront investment and product documentation is more readily available. Chef is a very similar offering, however, at the …
Puppet has a very wide user base with many organizations tht support it as well as conferences and events. Puppet DSL is based in Ruby while the server is now in Clojure providing ease of configuration with the power of scale. Puppet is a great entry point into the world of …
AWS Opsworks is good for linking AWS services and setting up and maintaining webservers using Chef. However, it will become EOL soon so we would not recommend starting new projects using it and instead go for the recommended Systems Manager setup
Most of the major issues that people had with the language have been addressed in Puppet 4 which primarily pertain to the limitations of the language and its ability to scale. It would be nice to allow for full ruby support as an unsupported option though so developers are able to reference their own data sources dynamically.
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
The complexity can get a little overwhelming in a more collaborative deployment methodology across multiple platforms and data centers.
Some external changes to Puppet like the new Puppet 4 architecture can cause considerable time consuming migration efforts especially if you have a lot of legacy classes and configuration that do not conform readily to the new design.
Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.
Puppet has top class support. You can simply mail them with their query and they will respond to your query in a timely manner. We do have enterprise license for puppet. Also there is a vibrant community for puppet out there. So even if you dont purchase a premium support option you can simply google your queries and get answers
OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.
Puppet was selected before I joined the team, had it been my choice I would have much rather went with Chef as it has the ability to do things that Puppet has not yet added to their system such a the ability to quickly query what host currently are allowing puppet to maintain their files or the ability to run remote commands without having to include it in a manifest like Chef does with the knife command. Salt allows you to do similar things to the knife command that is included with Chef, and also allows you to transfer files quickly to multiple host at once with a short simple command.
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.
With all the DevOps and automation that we have going on, we save a ton of time on the configuration of the server. It's safe to say that configuring servers via console or via UI is a thing of the past.
We try to get all the things done by using a centralized repo (GitHub). Puppet is one tool that actually gets the actual work done.
The small amount that we spent on purchasing premium Puppet is completely justified because of the time and effort that this tool actually helps us save.
