Tuesday, April 30, 2013

AWS Summit Liveblog: Introducing AWS OpsWorks

Usual liveblog disclaimer, this could be messy, please excuse typos, sorry for that.

Chris Barclay, Product manager for AWS OpsWorks is presenting

Application Management Challenges - Reliability and Scalability are important, operations tasks typically: Provision, Deplot, etc.

"Once Upon a Time..."  - We took the time to develop everything by hand (home made bread)

Today we need to automate to go faster (cranking out automation in a factory like, mass produced way)

In Today's infrastructure, everything is considered code, including the configuration of the "parts", sounds much like a recent Cloudcast we did...

AWS OpsWorks is a tool to tackle this challenge, very reliable and repeatable and integrated with AWS, at no additional cost

Why use OpsWOrks?
Simple, Productive, Flexible, Powerful, Secure

Common complaint was there are a lot of AWS "building blocks" but many don't want to stitch them together, AWS at times can be complex because of large number of services offered

Chris turned over the presentation over to another person (didn't catch the name) at DriveDev, DevOps consulting group, focus on F500 and startups

He talked about a typical "old school" application development that went poorly. They were able to use built in OpsWorks recipes with the addition of Chef Cookbooks on top of it. Took customer and migrated them off private and into public with OpsWorks in a short amount of time.  Basically, they were a success...

How are customers using OpsWorks today?

From OS to application using OpsWorks, From OS to your code using beanstalk, From OS up and automate everything with Chef or another tool

Takeaway - It depends on how much automation you need and at what level and up depends on which tool will be best.


Demo Time...

Talking about Chef and how OpsWorks uses it

The concept of Lifecycle events, based on this a recipe is triggered

 

Showing integration with github, keeps source and cookbooks out on git

Chris did a creation of a stack, PHP app server layer with MySQL on top, then added instances and started them up (could change to multiple AZ's for HA at creation)

After this, there are builtin Chef recipes that can be used, you can also add your own if need additional functionality, can also add additional EBS volumes if needed, elastic IP's, IAM Instance profiles, etc.

Talked about a time based instance - an instance that only exists during certain times of day, also threshold instances that can be fired up as needed (scaling of an app server based on memory, CPU, network, etc)

Added the app from git onto the stack that was built

Chris went from here into deep level git items that were above me (I admit I'm not the target audience here).  The take away, he made a change, committed the change, performed a deployment, looked very easy

Now on to Permissions - talking about various 

What's next?  More integrations with AWS resources (i.e. ELB features) - Deeper VPC, more built-in layers (go vote on their forums, they will prioritize by public opinion)

Summary: OpsWorks for productivity, control, reliability


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