Author: Chris Barclay

Today Jeff Barr blogged about a new feature that gives users the ability to deploy and operate applications on existing Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with AWS OpsWorks. You may know OpsWorks as a service that lets users deploy and manage applications. However OpsWorks can also perform operational tasks that simplify server management. This […]

AWS OpsWorks lets you deploy and manage application of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks layers let you create blueprints for EC2 instances to install and configure any software that you want. This blog will show you how to create a custom layer for Docker. For an overview of Docker, see https://www.docker.com/tryit. Docker lets you precisely […]

AWS OpsWorks now allows users to define environment variables per application. Instead of creating a custom recipe and managing environment variables as Chef attributes, you define the environment variables on each app and OpsWorks takes care of securely storing and sending the environment variables from your OpsWorks app definition to your instances and adding them […]

A good practice for maintaining highly available applications is to monitor the metrics that impact performance and service levels. AWS OpsWorks includes built-in integration with 14 Amazon CloudWatch metrics, including load, CPU and memory, but you may also want to monitor other metrics such as disk space utilization or application-level metrics such as error rates. […]

It is often useful to be able to store log files in a central place for easy access and reporting. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a new service that is designed to help you monitor, store, and access your system, application, and custom log files from Amazon EC2 instances. For example, you can monitor application logs […]

There are a number of ways to customize Amazon EC2 instances using AWS OpsWorks. In a previous blog we demonstrated some easy ways to customize OpsWorks by writing your own recipes. In this blog we’re going to show how to use Chef attributes to customize recipes. Chef attributes are input parameters to Chef recipes. The […]

AWS OpsWorks is an application management service that makes it easy to deploy and operate applications of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks uses Chef to install and configure software on Amazon EC2 instances and lets you automate any task that can be scripted. In this blog post, we will show a step-by-step example for how […]

Today we launched the ability for AWS CloudFormation to provision and update AWS OpsWorks resources such as stacks, layers and applications. You can include both OpsWorks and other AWS resources such as Amazon VPC, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon RDS in a single CloudFormation template. This makes it easy to document, version control, and share […]

A key OpsWorks benefit is the ability to perform actions on EC2 instances in an automated and predictable manner, such as installing software, configuring RAID arrays, and managing users. Whereas in the past you might have run commands on your instance via SSH, you can now perform these tasks by using predefined scripts (called recipes) […]

We’re pleased to announce support for AWS OpsWorks in the AWS Console mobile app, available on Amazon Appstore, Google Play, and iTunes. The mobile app lets you view the configuration and health of your resources on the go so you can better understand and respond to incidents that may impact your application when you can’t […]