AWS OpsWorks vs. AWS Systems Manager

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.

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When you have a process running in aws that needs to copy files to group of instances as part of the process Installing software on a group of machines Adding Cloudwatch agent to instance.

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• connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
• easy configuration management deployment via Chef

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• Copy files to a group of instance with particular tag
• Enable CW agent and push metrics to CW
• Easy to install software in a group of instances.

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• Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
• To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
• The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.

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• I would like to see the Search feature improved a bit more.
• UI is little bit confusing initially

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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.

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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.

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• very quick way of creating new infrastructure
• low maintenance costs
• easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs

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• Reduced team's time spent on EC2 management
• Patch management
• Remote access

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