AWS OpsWorks Reviews & Insights

Opsworks is one of the main orchestration system we use for creating AWS services and connecting between them.
We've been using Opsworks for nearly 8 years and it has successfully allowed us to build and host infrastructure for large Drupal websites.

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

We currently use AWS OpsWorks in hosting our application core. It forms the foundation of our product, which is used by the entire company; however, only a few select members of our backend team manage it directly. AWS OpsWorks allows us to leverage the powerful EC2 infrastructure without having to build out a custom instance management system.

Scenarios where OpsWorks is well suited:

• You have a team that's heavily invested in AWS infrastructure and want to simplify the management of your EC2 instances.
• You have a large proficient DevOps team and you're willing to put into the time to learn Chef and dig deep into operations management.

Scenarios where OpsWorks is less appropriate:

• You don't have a proficient DevOps team or development team that is able to dedicate a considerable amount of time to learn Chef and get your instances configured.
• You want to build an application that is infrastructure-agnostic that can easily be moved to different hosting on short notice.

We currently use Opsworks to help orchestrate parts of our infrastructure and manage instances via Chef recipes. It is used for the majority of the backend services we produce. It gives us a framework around which to hang our applications and an easy way to rebuild servers, auto-scale services and do basic monitoring.

Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.