How AWS Opswork introcan be used effectively?

Opswork is a cloud computing service, which is facilitated by Amazon, that helps in managing the deployment of the infrastructure meant for cloud administrators. It can be understood as a DevOps service by Amazon, that helps perform operations like Mode, Control, and Automating applications which can be of any scale and complexity.

Opswork comes with the feature of reducing errors when they are used with traditional scripted configuration. It is based on the open-source Chef tool, and works with scripting languages.

Opswork can be visualized as a ‘Chef + Custom AMI’ unit, which can be used to create layers. On top of these layers, an application can be built and can be deployed.

By using Opswork service, the process of deployment, configuring applications, and the operation tasks for distributed applications is automated. Cloud administrators and developers have the ability to define configuration for infrastructure and resources. These resources include (but are not limited to) storage, database options, selection of the appropriate operating system, the instance type on which application has to be deployed.

Opswork helps organize applications into layers, which help facilitate EC2 instance and the resource to build an application.

Stacks can be customized or pre-built layer templates can be used with the help of open-source tool Chef, which are known as cookbooks. Stacks are used to define system configurations where systems can include server, database, and load balancing facilities.

Layers are used to configure subsystems, which refer to web or database servers. They are also used to manage resource sets which can include instances, elastic block store volumes as well as elastic IP address.

20 stacks running with 20 layers each is considered as the default computing limit which can be scaled as per the requirements.

These layers help in the smooth operation of components present in Ruby, PHP, Node.js, Amazon RDS, Java, HA proxy, MySQL and Memcached.

Once the stack with specific number of layers has been set up, Opswork takes the responsibility of pulling the code of the application from the location defined by the user. This code is stored in a location which can be accessed by the instance.

Applications can be configured to run in VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). Opswork comes with support for AWS IAM (Identity Access Management), and it also facilitates built-in security group for every layer in the stack.

Load balancers can be deployed that help in balancing the traffic and routing it to the right instance at the right point in time. In addition to this, Opswork can also be used to monitor the health of an application, by monitoring the lifecycle of the application. It can further be used to detect and replace the instances which would have failed.

When a specific event goes over its resource threshold, Opswork takes the responsibility of generating an alarm that would trigger notifications or take some action.

Pricing

It is free of cost, meaning customers have to pay only for the compute power, storage and other resources which are chargeable.

It comes with support for on-premise servers which are charged on an hourly basis. Apart from this, no additional charges are incurred.

When to use Opswork service?

• If the user is looking for a DevOps model, that requires a powerful end-to-end platform, Opswork is the right choice.
• If the user is looking for a management by provider kind of model, EC2 is the right choice.

Conclusion

In this post, we understood the importance of Opswork and how it can be used effectively as an end-to-end powerful platform for DevOps.