AWS OpsWorks vs. Progress Chef

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

Incentivized

Chef is a very nice tool for establishing and maintaining a consistent configuration across a range of servers. In addition, Automate allows the continued monitoring and maintenance of servers so they don't drift from established standards. Overall, it deals very well with complex systems. Chef is slightly less applicable for a micro-services approach where the servers are replicated from a simple and known starting point.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Chef is very easy to learn. Written in ruby, Chef code is high enough level for non-ruby coders to get a general idea of what the script is doing.
• Chef can be a one stop shop for writing code, testing infrastructure, and deployment of applications.
• The Chef support team is very helpful in their auto manager support as well as active support in their Slack channels from development engineers & architects.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• One main concern with Chef is the maintainability of Chef master.
• The Chef-client should be installed on every node we want to do any automation.
• It is mostly Ruby and there's a learning curve. Need to understand the fundamentals of Chef very throughly to play around with attributes, templates etc etc.
• The Chef-client agent needs to be run on the nodes frequently to update the details of it state to master. And also to index the nodes based on tags.

Incentivized

The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation

Incentivized

It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Chef is the more developer-oriented of the three main tools in this space. It has a steeper learning curve as a result but it allows you to do more. Puppet seems to be more geared towards automated the management of the operating system. Ansible is an excellent tool but requires you to allow SSH connectivity into all of your instances.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We can deploy tens to hundreds of servers in a small amount of time.
• We can grow our infrastructure very quickly with limited resources adjusting to customer demand as soon as the need arises.
• We are able to automate many of the mundane tasks that used to occupy the time of our engineers allowing us to focus on more critical tasks.

Incentivized