AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
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Dripos
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Dripos is a point-of-sale (POS) software for restaurants, that includes includes tool for other areas of operation like delivery, mobile orders, marketing, and team management.
Dripos syncs between all ordering platforms, offering a dedicated customer ordering mobile app and the ability to dispatch your own delivery drives or dripos network for drivers.
The administrative side of Dripos includes integrated analytics, branded expense cards, and full accounting software.
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.
Dripos is a great alternative to Square POS in most use cases. Although the monthly fee is higher than Square's "free," the fact that so many other features are included in that price — loyalty, online ordering, scheduling, team messaging, even payroll — makes it a much better value than paying for those add-ons within Square. It is best suited for quick-serve places with limited menus (I wouldn't yet suggest running a full-service, waiters-at-tables restaurant with it) and employee teams with no more than 20 per location (updates to scheduler may change this assessment soon enough).
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.
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.
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.
Dripos is an affordable upgrade from Square POS, but still less costly than alternatives like Toast or Upserve, and does not require purchase of any specialized equipment outside of card readers (main software works on any iOS or Android devices, and you can mix and match these). Their customer service and tech support are both top-notch and more responsive than any others I've experienced.
