AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

2017 Year in Review: AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and Puppet Enterprise

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise provide fully managed Chef and Puppet servers with a suite of automation tools for infrastructure and application management. Enterprise customers rely on OpsWorks for easy configuration management and secure maintenance as the service automatically patches, updates, and backs up servers. This blog post gives you a quick recap of this year’s announcements and events for AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise.

Announcing OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise support has been the most popular request for AWS OpsWorks since AWS launched the service. Using OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise, customers can easily manage hybrid infrastructure as code, register node instances without signing certificate requests on the Puppet master, and run modules from the Puppet Forge community. AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise is integrated with AWS CloudTrail and AWS CodeCommit. AWS CloudTrail captures all of the AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise API calls and delivers log files to an Amazon S3 bucket. AWS CodeCommit hosts R10K remote repositories, which are general purpose toolsets for deploying Puppet environments and modules.

Launch announcement

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate now supports Chef Compliance

The release of Chef Automate version 1.6 includes the new Compliance view for the Chef Automate UI. With AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate integrated with compliance, you can track the compliance of your infrastructure based on a predefined policy. This allows you to frequently audit your applications for vulnerabilities and remediate violations.

Launch announcement

re:Invent – Automate and scale configuration management with AWS OpsWorks

At re:Invent 2017, we hosted a session on automating and scaling configuration management through AWS OpsWorks. We gave an overview of how using the DevOps model to treat infrastructure environments as code enables you to automate and scale development and production environments.

We showed re:Invent session attendees how OpsWorks lets you use Chef and Puppet to automate the way servers are configured, deployed, and managed across your Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises compute environments. We walked through how OpsWorks helps you to focus on the core task of configuration management using Puppet and Chef by setting up and maintaining your environment in just a few clicks.

Slides

Video

Right after re:Invent, we released two more updates.

Availability in six new Regions

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise are available in six new Regions: US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). With this release, this service is available in nine regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).

We added these Regions based on customer feedback, adoption of other AWS products, and to provide wider geographical coverage.

AWS Regions and Endpoints

Create backups from the console

With this release, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and Puppet Enterprise customers can also create manual backups through the AWS Management Console. Earlier, manual backups were limited to using a CLI command. A backup – either manual or automated – saves application-level server data, such as cookbooks, modules, users, organizations, and node configurations. Backup excludes any additional files that you store on the server EC2 instance.

Back Up an AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate Server

Back Up an AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise Server

About the Author

Rahul Gulati is a Product Manager at AWS OpsWorks. He enjoys working with customers and engineering teams to build software products.