AWS OpsWorks – One Week Report

Its been an exciting first week for AWS OpsWorks.

We appreciate all the product feedback through Twitter, blogs, forums and email. We wanted to share a few common questions that were hearing and explain a little more about our plans for the service. We also invite you to join our Introduction to AWS OpsWorks webinar on March 18, 2013 for a hands-on look at the service.

First, a little more about AWS OpsWorks. As Werner mentioned in his blog, AWS OpsWorks is built on technology originally developed by Peritor, the creators of Scalarium, which was acquired by AWS in 2012. We launched the service with initial support for DevOps application modeling, control, and automation use cases. We plan to rapidly broaden the service by adding more layer types, support for more AWS services, and new features that make it easier for you to control and automate your applications.

Now, on to your questions. You can also see all of our FAQs online.

Q: Do you plan to add support for other layer types, such as Java or Postgres?

Yes, we plan to add built-in support for other layer types. Your feedback on the AWS forums will help us prioritize which ones we add first. Today, though, you can use the AWS OpsWorks custom layer feature to add just about any layer type, including leveraging the hundreds of community-supported Chef cookbooks.

Q: Do you plan to support AWS services such as Amazon VPC, Amazon RDS, and Elastic Load Balancing?

Yes, in addition to already supporting Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS IAM, we plan on integrating other AWS services and allowing you to manage them directly from AWS OpsWorks. Your feedback on the AWS forums will help us prioritize which ones we add first. Today, though, you can use Chef recipes within AWS OpsWorks to integrate your Stack with any AWS service. You can see an example of integrating with Amazon S3 in the documentation walk through.

Q: What operating systems does AWS OpsWorks support?

AWS OpsWorks currently supports Amazon Linux and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Your feedback on the AWS forums will help us prioritize which additional operating systems to add.

Q: Does AWS OpsWorks support custom AMIs?

No, not at this time. AWS OpsWorks supports the ability to add software to AMIs by defining additional operating system packages and Chef recipes per Layer. Let us know if you need support for your use case in the AWS forums.

Q: Does AWS OpsWorks support other configuration management solutions such as Puppet or CFEngine?

No, not at this time. Let us know if you need support for your use case in the AWS forums.

Q: Can AWS OpsWorks orchestrate changes using Chef recipes after an instance has booted?

Yes. AWS OpsWorks sends lifecycle events to distribute information about the environment, including application deployments, new instance starts, and other information that may be important to maintain your application’s configuration. For details please read the documentation on AWS OpsWorks Lifecycle Events.

— Chris Barclay, Senior Product Manager

PS – Check out the Getting Started With AWS OpsWorks video to see the product in action.