AWS OpsWorks vs Consul

• 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

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• Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
• K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
• API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
• Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

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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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• We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
• Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
• The agent could be easier to run.

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• OpsWorks has allowed some of our more simple application stacks to be implemented quickly and effectively. Whilst it is difficult to put actual numbers on it, it meant we could hit the ground running before tackling the more complex world of Cloudformation/Terraform to manage parts of our infrastructure.

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• Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
• Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
• The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.

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