Hacking AWS OpsWorks

At Sport Ngin we use AWS OpsWorks heavily. We running 25 applications across our platform, 50 different OpsWorks stacks between our staging and production accounts. We've been using OpsWorks basically since it was announced 2 years ago. We built a command line utility(http://github.com/sportngin/opsicle) to help us along the way. I could give a presentation about OpsWorks in general and the evolution of how we've use it. If there's time start talking about the tradeoffs of using OpsWorks vs rolling your own chef server/provisioning setup.

Transcript

1. Hacking AWS OpsWorks Andy Fleener @andyfleener
2. Sport Ngin Platform January 2013
 March 2013
 June 2014
 February 11, 2015 8 applications running on 2 different “Paas” First new application launches on OpsWorks Decision is made to move all applications to OpsWorks All 25 web applications running on OpsWorks
3. Why Move Running on 3 different platforms was hard None of the 3 fully met our needs Consolidating allowed us to become experts in a 
 single platform
4. Why OpsWorks High level of customizability Did the low level work for us Stayed out of our way Good pricing model Stays fresh by releasing new features
5. What is OpsWorks
6. Rub Some DevOps Cloud DevOps Cloud Application Management On it!
7. No seriously WTF is it?
8. Application Manager Config Management - Chef/OpsWorks Lifecycle orchestration Automated Deployments - Via Chef’s deploy resource Application Stack definitions - Built-in or using custom defined stacks Resource Management - EIPs/EBS/ELBs
9. Primitives Stacks Layers Apps Instances
10. Chef/OpsWorks Agent Chef Solo/Chef Zero OpsWorks Agent Agent pings home to see if it needs to run Chef All life cycle events translate to a Chef run 
 with different run lists.
11. Life Cycle Events Setup Deploy Configure Undeploy Shutdown
12. Other Goodies EIPs EBS Volumes ELBs IAM User Management RDS Integration
13. Cool Story..
14. But will it blend?
15. The Good Everything is an API Direct integration with other Amazon tools Fast release cycle A bit of built in orchestration
16. The Bad User experience is OK-ish It’s not a typical Chef setup Auto Healing is a waste of a feature Not enough orchestration
17. Getting Started
18. Use built-in layers!
19. Questions to Ask Am I going to run this in production? Will this application have users? Do I need zero downtime deployments? Do I care about what software is running on my servers?
20. Don’t use built-in layers
21. Hybrid Approach
22. Custom Layers Reuse OpsWorks’ chef cookbooks Still have full control over the run list Replace parts that don’t meet your needs Use Layers as roles to attach run lists to layers Use custom security groups
23. Shipping all the bits
24. Updating Your Chef All Chef versions use a site-cookbooks pattern Berkshelf can help Watch out for indeterminate dependency resolution All the OpsWorks cookbooks are open source
 https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks
25. Deploying Your App What’s your deployment strategy? Built-in chef deploys with minimal downtime Work must be done to make them zero downtime
26. Zero Downtime Deploys Two reasonable techniques: - Zero downtime on each instance - Use orchestration to do rolling restarts
27. Leveling Up
28. Improving the UX Automation is key Building good abstractions CLI is faster MOAR Orchestration!!
29. Opsicle https://github.com/sportngin/opsicle
30. What does it do? Deployments Chef Cookbook updates Arbitrary Chef runs Monitor deployment activity ssh / ssh key management Moves management closer to the code
31. Primary Goals Improve the developer experience Build good layers of abstraction Add more automation
32. Road Map More visibility into deployments Instance management (start/stop/create/delete) Stack creation/configuration
33. DEMO TIME! https://github.com/anfleene/opsworks_rails_demo https://github.com/anfleene/opsworks_rails_demo_cookbooks
34. Why not normal Chef?
35. Everything has tradeoffs
36. OpsWorks Easy to get started Built-in server management OpsWorks runs the backend service Removes some of the complex parts of Chef It’s only kind of Chef
37. Chef Server It’s actually Chef Cookbooks from the community will work if you set them up right More freedom about how to run/maintain Bigger investment into ensuring you have a working Chef server Possible single point of failure
38. What Do You All Think?