AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
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IBM Terraform
Score8.7 out of 10
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IBM Terraform (formerly Hashicorp Terraform) is a cloud infrastructure automation tool used to create, change, and improve production infrastructure, and it allows infrastructure to be expressed as code. It is available Open Source, and via Cloud and Self-Hosted editions.
Opsworks will become EOL soon and we have been using the recommended Systems Manager solution recently which offers a lot more flexibility in terms of orchestration technology (ie. higher Chef versions) and easier to integrate with even more AWS services.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Backend Software Engineer in Information Technology at 10 Digital Media Limited (Sports, 1-10 employees)
Chose AWS OpsWorks
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 …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Anything that needs to be repeated en masse. Terraform is great at taking a template and have it be repeated across your estate. You can dynamically change the assets they're generating depending on certain variables. Which means though templated assets will all be similar, they're allowed to have unique properties about them. For example flattening JSON into tabular data and ensuring the flattening code is unique to the file's schema.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The language itself is a bit unusual and this makes it hard for new users to get onboarded into the codebase. While it's improving with later releases, basic concepts like "map an array of options into a set of configurations" or "apply this logic if a variable is specified" are possible but unnecessarily cumbersome.
The 'Terraform Plan' operation could be substantially more sophisticated. There are many situations where a Terraform file could never work but successfully passes the 'plan' phase only to fail during the 'apply' phase.
Environment migrations could be smoother. Renaming/refactoring files is a challenge because of the need to use 'Terraform mv' commands, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
The syntax itself is pretty straightforward. The documentation is well-maintained & easy to follow. Most cloud providers, even smaller ones, maintain official provider libraries, making discovery & learning a breeze. Some, like GCP, even provide high-level libraries on top of their own more primitive provider, making building complex infra much more manageable. The language itself is cloud-agnostic, so you can literally manage resources from multiple providers in a single Terraform repo.
Terraform's performance is quite amazing when it comes to deployment of resources in AWS. Of course, the deployment times depend on various parameters like the number of resources to deploy and different regions to deploy. Terraform cannot control that. The only minor drawback probably shows up when a terraform job is terminated mid way. Then in many cases, time-consuming manual cleanup is required.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have yet to have an opportunity to reach out directly to HashiCorp for support on Terraform. However, I have spent a great deal of time considering their documentation as I use the tool. This opinion is based solely on that. I find the Terraform documentation to have great breadth but lacking in depth in many areas. I appreciate that all of the tool's resources have an entry in the docs but often the examples are lacking. Often, the examples provided are very basic and prompt additional exploration. Also, the links in the documentation often link back to the same page where one might expect to be linked to a different source with additional information.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Terraform is the solid leader in the space. It allows you to do more then just provisioning within a pre-existing servers. It is more extensible and has more providers available than it competitors. It is also open source and more adopted by the community then some of the other solutions that are available in the market place.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
we are able to deploy our infrastructure in a couple of ours in an automated and repeatable way, before this could take weeks if the work was done manually and was a lot of error prone.
having the state file, you can see a diff of what things have changed manually out side of Terraform which is a huge plus
if state file gets corrupted, it is very hard to debug or restore it without an impact or spending hours ..
writing big scale code can be very challenging and hard to be efficient so it's usable by the whole team
