AWS OpsWorks

A configuration management service that helps you configure and operate applications in a cloud enterprise by using Puppet or Chef.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks and AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate (1 and 2) let you use Chef cookbooks and solutions for configuration management, while OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise lets you configure a Puppet Enterprise master server in AWS.
Limits
- Configuration management servers per region: 5
- Automated backups per configuration management server: 30
- Manual backups per configuration management server: 10
With AWS OpsWorks, you can automate how nodes are configured, deployed, and managed, whether they are Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises devices:

opsworks-stacks

OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

Provides a fully-managed Puppet master, a suite of automation tools that enable you to inspect, deliver, operate, and future-proof your applications, and access to a user interface that lets you view information about your nodes and Puppet activities.
Does not support all regions.
Uses puppet-agent software.
Features
- AWS manages the Puppet master server running on an EC2 instance. You retain control over the underlying resources running your Puppet master.
- You can choose the weekly maintenance window during which OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise will automatically install updates.
- Monitors the health of your Puppet master during update windows and automatically rolls back changes if issues are detected.
- You can configure automatic backups for your Puppet master and store them in an S3 bucket in your account.
- You can register new nodes to your Puppet master by inserting a user-data script, provided in the OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise StarterKit, into your Auto Scaling groups.
- Puppet uses SSL and a certification approval process when communicating to ensure that the Puppet master responds only to requests made by trusted users.
Deleting a server also deletes its events, logs, and any modules that were stored on the server. Supporting resources are also deleted, along with all automated backups.
Pricing
- You are charged based on the number of nodes (servers running the Puppet agent) connected to your Puppet master and the time those nodes are running on an hourly rate, and you also pay for the underlying EC2 instance running your Puppet master.

OpsWorks for Chef Automate

Lets you create AWS-managed Chef servers that include Chef Automate premium features, and use the Chef DK and other Chef tooling to manage them.
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate supports Chef Automate 2.
Uses chef-client.
Features
- You can use Chef to manage both Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers running Linux or Windows.
- You receive the full Chef Automate platform which includes premium features that you can use with Chef server, like Chef Workflow, Chef Visibility, and Chef Compliance.
- You provision a managed Chef server running on an EC2 instance in your account. You retain control over the underlying resources running your Chef server and you can use Knife to SSH into your Chef server instance at any time.
- You can set a weekly maintenance window during which OpsWorks for Chef Automate will automatically install updates.
- You can configure automatic backups for your Chef server and is stored in an S3 bucket.
- You can register new nodes to your Chef server by inserting user-data code snippets provided by OpsWorks for Chef Automate into your Auto Scaling groups.
- Chef uses SSL to ensure that the Chef server responds only to requests made by trusted users. The Chef server and Chef client use bidirectional validation of identity when communicating with each other.
Deleting a server also deletes its events, logs, and any cookbooks that were stored on the server. Supporting resources are deleted also, along with all automated backups.
Pricing
- You are charged based on the number of nodes connected to your Chef server and the time those nodes are running, and you also pay for the underlying EC2 instance running your Chef server.

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OpsWorks Stacks

Provides a simple and flexible way to create and manage stacks and applications.
Stacks are group of AWS resources that constitute an full-stack application. By default, you can create up to 40 Stacks, and each stack can hold up to 40 layers, 40 instances, and 40 apps.
You can create stacks that help you manage cloud resources in specialized groups called layers. A layer represents a set of EC2 instances that serve a particular purpose, such as serving applications or hosting a database server. Layers depend on Chef recipes to handle tasks such as installing packages on instances, deploying apps, and running scripts.

AWS Training AWS OpsWorks 2

OpsWorks Stacks does NOT require or create Chef servers.
Features
- You can deploy EC2 instances from template configurations, including EBS volume creation.
- You can configure the software on your instances on-demand or automatically based on lifecycle events, from bootstrapping the base OS image into a working server to modifying running services to reflect changes.
- OpsWorks Stacks can auto heal your stack. If an instance fails in your stack, OpsWorks Stacks can replace it with a new one.
- You can adapt the number of running instances to match your load, with time-based or load-based auto scaling.
- You can use OpsWorks Stacks to configure and manage both Linux and Windows EC2 instances.
- You can use AWS OpsWorks Stacks to deploy, manage, and scale your application on any Linux server such as EC2 instances or servers running in your own data center.
Instance Types
- 24/7 instances are started manually and run until you stop them.
- Time-based instances are run by OpsWorks Stacks on a specified daily and weekly schedule. They allow your stack to automatically adjust the number of instances to accommodate predictable usage patterns.
- Load-based instances are automatically started and stopped by OpsWorks Stacks, based on specified load metrics, such as CPU utilization. They allow your stack to automatically adjust the number of instances to accommodate variations in incoming traffic.
  - Load-based instances are available only for Linux-based stacks.
Lifecycle Events
- You can run recipes manually, but OpsWorks Stacks also lets you automate the process by supporting a set of five lifecycle events:
  - Setup occurs on a new instance after it successfully boots.
  - Configure occurs on all of the stack’s instances when an instance enters or leaves the online state.
  - Deploy occurs when you deploy an app.
  - Undeploy occurs when you delete an app.
  - Shutdown occurs when you stop an instance.
Monitoring
- OpsWorks Stacks sends all of your resource metrics to CloudWatch.
- Logs are available for each action performed on your instances.
- CloudTrail logs all API calls made to OpsWorks.
Security
- Grant IAM users access to specific stacks, making management of multi-user environments easier.
- You can also set user-specific permissions for actions on each stack, allowing you to decide who can deploy new application versions or create new resources.
- Each EC2 instance has one or more associated security groups that govern the instance’s network traffic. A security group has one or more rules, each of which specifies a particular category of allowed traffic.
Pricing
- You pay for AWS resources created using OpsWorks Stacks in the same manner as if you created them manually.

How do I troubleshoot issues deleting instances when using AWS OpsWorks Stacks?

AWS OpsWorks-related Cheat Sheets:

Elastic Beanstalk vs CloudFormation vs OpsWorks vs CodeDeploy

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

A company has hybrid cloud architecture where their on-premises data center interacts with their cloud resources in AWS. Which of the following services in AWS could you use to deploy a web application to servers running on-premises? (Select TWO)

AWS CloudFormation
AWS OpsWorks
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS Batch

Show me the answer!

Correct Answers: 2,4

Enterprise environments are often a mix of cloud, on-premises data centers, and edge locations. Hybrid cloud architectures help organizations integrate their on-premises and cloud operations to support a broad spectrum of use cases using a common set of cloud services, tools, and APIs across on-premises and cloud environments.

Customers can seamlessly integrate their on-premises and cloud storage, networking, identity management, and security policies to enable use cases such as data center extension to the cloud, backup, and disaster recovery to the cloud, and hybrid data processing.

AWS offers services that integrate application deployment and management across on-premises and cloud environments for a robust hybrid architecture. Below are the following services that you can use to manage or deploy applications to your servers running on-premises:

OpsWorks – AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that helps customers configure and operate applications, both on-premises and in the AWS Cloud, using Chef and Puppet.

CodeDeploy – AWS CodeDeploy automates code deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and instances running on-premises. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier to rapidly release new features, avoids downtime during application deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications.

Hence, the correct answers in this scenario are AWS OpsWorks and AWS CodeDeploy.

Both AWS CloudFormation and AWS Elastic Beanstalk are incorrect because these services can only deploy applications to your AWS resources and not to the servers located in your on-premises data center.

AWS Batch is incorrect because this service simply has a set of batch management capabilities that enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. It doesn’t have the capability to deploy applications to your on-premises servers.

References:
https://aws.amazon.com/hybrid/use-cases/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/instances-on-premises.html
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/overview-of-deployment-options-on-aws.pdf

Question 2

You created a Chef Server in AWS OpsWorks with 3 running nodes. As its utilization goes up, you realize that you need to add more nodes to meet resource demands. However, it would take too much time to manually add them one at a time whenever you need to. In this scenario, is there a recommended way to automatically add EC2 nodes to your Chef Server?

Yes, you can run an unattended script as part of standalone instance user data, use a CloudFormation template to add it to new instance user data, configure a cron job to run the script regularly, or run chef-client within a service.
No, you have to use the console or the CLI to create the nodes because they require you to review your launch configurations before they can be launched.
Yes, you can install the Chef Client Cookbook and use an unattended association script passed to the user data section of EC2 instance instructions, EC2 Auto Scaling group launch configurations, or a CloudFormation template.
Yes, you can use the knife bootstrap command to add one node to your Chef server and iterate it to add more.

Show me the answer!

Correct Answer: 3

You can add nodes automatically to your Chef Server using the unattended method. The recommended method of unattended (or automatic) association of new nodes is to configure the Chef Client Cookbook. With this method, a script is used to run the opsworks-cm API associate-node command to associate a new node with your Chef server. Steps are found in the references. Hence, the correct answer is the option that says, “Yes, you can install the Chef Client Cookbook and use an unattended association script passed to the user data section of EC2 instance instructions, EC2 Auto Scaling group launch configurations, or a CloudFormation template.“

The option that says, “Yes, you can run an unattended script as part of standalone instance user data, use a CloudFormation template to add it to new instance user data, configure a cron job to run the script regularly, or run chef-client within a service” is incorrect. Although more difficult to achieve and not recommended, you can run the script as part of standalone instance user data, use a CloudFormation template to add it to new instance user data, configure a cron job to run the script regularly, or run chef-client within a service. However, AWS recommends the Chef Client Cookbook method because of the disadvantages of other automation techniques, which can be seen in the references pages.

The option that says, “No, you have to use the console or the CLI to create the nodes because they require you to review your launch configurations before they can be launched” is incorrect since there is a way for you to automatically add nodes to your Chef Server, which is by using the unattended method.

The option that says, “Yes, you can use the knife bootstrap command to add one node to your Chef server and iterate it to add more” is incorrect. You can run a knife command that adds or bootstraps an EC2 instance so that the Chef server can manage it. But for adding nodes automatically, it would be better to use a script to perform unattended association of nodes with the Chef server.

References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/opscm-addnodes.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/opscm-unattend-assoc.html

For more AWS practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check this out: