Tag: OpsWorks

Over the past few months, the AWS OpsWorks team has introduced several enhancements to existing features and added to support for new one. Let’s discuss some of these new capabilities. ·       Chef client 12.13.37 – Released a new AWS OpsWorks agent version for Chef 12 for Linux, enabling the latest enhancements from Chef. The OpsWorks […]

This post will show you how to integrate Auto Scaling groups with AWS OpsWorks so you can leverage  the native scaling capabilities of Amazon EC2 and the OpsWorks Chef configuration management solution. Auto Scaling ensures you have the correct number of EC2 instances available to handle your application load.  You create collections of EC2 instances […]

Custom JSON, which has always been available on AWS OpsWorks stacks and deployments, is now also available as a property on layers in stacks using Chef versions 11.10, 12, and 12.2. In this post I show how you can use custom JSON to adapt a single Chef cookbook to support different use cases on individual […]

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 […]

AWS OpsWorks customers frequently request the ability to run arbitrary commands. And while OpsWorks sets up and manages the Amazon EC2 instances your application runs on and manages users’ access to your instances, it doesn’t allow running arbitrary commands. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to run uptime across your fleet. You could create […]

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 […]