AWS OpsWorks Now Supports Chef 12 for Linux

Update: In the meantime our friends at Chef published a post that walks you through deploying a Django app on AWS OpsWorks using Chef 12. Go check it out!

In addition to providing Chef 12 support for Windows, AWS OpsWorks (OpsWorks) now supports Chef 12 for Linux operating systems. This release benefits users who want to take advantage of the large selection of community cookbooks or want to build and customize their own cookbooks.

You can use the latest release of Chef 12 to support Linux-based stacks currently running Chef Client 12.5.1 (For those of you concerned about future Chef Client upgrades, be assured that new versions of the Chef 12.x Client will be made available shortly after their public release). OpsWorks now also prevents cookbook namespace conflicts by using two separate Chef runs (OpsWorks’s Chef run and yours run independently).

Use Chef Supermarket Cookbooks

Because this release focuses on providing you with full control and flexibility when using your own cookbooks, built-in layers and cookbooks will no longer be available for Chef 12 (PHP, Rails, Node.JS, MySQL, etc.,). Instead, Chef 12 users can use OpsWorks to leverage up-to-date community cookbooks to support the creation of custom layers. A Chef 12 Node.js sample stack (on Windows and Linux) is now available in the OpsWorks console. We’ll provide additional examples in the future.

“With the availability of the Chef 12 Linux client, AWS OpsWorks customers can now leverage shared Chef Supermarket cookbooks for both Windows and Linux workloads. This means our joint customers can maximize the full potential of the vibrant open source Chef Community across the entire stack.”

– Ken Cheney, Vice President of Business Development, Chef

Chef 11.10 and earlier versions for Linux will continue to support built-in layers. The built-in cookbooks will continue to be available at https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks/tree/release-chef-11.10.

Beginning in January 2016, you will no longer be able to create Chef 11.4 stacks using the OpsWorks console. Existing Chef 11.4 stacks will continue to operate normally, and you will continue to be able to create stacks with Chef 11.4 by using the API.

Use Chef Search

With Chef 12 Linux, you can use Chef search, which is the native Chef way to obtain information about stacks, layers, instances, and stack resources, such as Elastic Load Balancing load balancers and RDS DB instances. The following examples show how to use Chef search to get information and to perform common tasks. A complete reference of available search indices is available in our documentation.

Use Chef search to retrieve the stack’s state:

search(:node, “name:web1”)
search(:node, “name:web*”)

Map OpsWorks layers as Chef roles:

appserver = search(:node, "role:my-app").first
Chef::Log.info(”Private IP: #{appserver[:private_ip]}")

Use Chef search to retrieve hostnames, IP addresses, instance types, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), Availability Zones (AZs), and more:

search(:aws_opsworks_app, "name:myapp")
search(:aws_opsworks_app, ”deploy:true")
search(:aws_opsworks_layer, "name:my_layer*")
search(:aws_opsworks_rds_db_instance)
search(:aws_opsworks_volume)
search(:aws_opsworks_ecs_cluster)
search(:aws_opsworks_elastic_load_balancer)
search(:aws_opsworks_user)

Use Chef search for ad-hoc resource discovery, for example, to find the database connection information for your applications or to discover all available app server instances when configuring a load-balancer.

Explore a Chef 12 Linux or Chef 12.2 Windows Stack

To explore a Chef 12 Linux or Chef 12.2 Windows stack, simply select the “Sample stack” option in the OpsWorks console:

To create a Chef 12 stack based on your Chef cookbooks, choose Linux as the Default operating system:

Use any Chef 12 open source community cookbook from any source, or create your own cookbooks. OpsWorks’s built-in operational tools continue to empower you to manage your day-to-day operations.