Hacking AWS OpsWorks - Speaker Deck

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Hacking AWS OpsWorks Andy Fleener @andyfleener

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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

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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

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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

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What is OpsWorks

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Rub Some DevOps Cloud DevOps Cloud Application Management On it!

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No seriously WTF is it?

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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

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Primitives Stacks Layers Apps Instances

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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.

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Life Cycle Events Setup Deploy Configure Undeploy Shutdown

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Other Goodies EIPs EBS Volumes ELBs IAM User Management RDS Integration

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Cool Story..

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But will it blend?

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The Good Everything is an API Direct integration with other Amazon tools Fast release cycle A bit of built in orchestration

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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

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Getting Started

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Use built-in layers!

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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?

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Don’t use built-in layers

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Hybrid Approach

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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

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Shipping all the bits

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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

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Deploying Your App What’s your deployment strategy? Built-in chef deploys with minimal downtime Work must be done to make them zero downtime

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Zero Downtime Deploys Two reasonable techniques: - Zero downtime on each instance - Use orchestration to do rolling restarts

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Leveling Up

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Improving the UX Automation is key Building good abstractions CLI is faster MOAR Orchestration!!

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Opsicle https://github.com/sportngin/opsicle

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What does it do? Deployments Chef Cookbook updates Arbitrary Chef runs Monitor deployment activity ssh / ssh key management Moves management closer to the code

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Primary Goals Improve the developer experience Build good layers of abstraction Add more automation

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Road Map More visibility into deployments Instance management (start/stop/create/delete) Stack creation/configuration

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DEMO TIME! https://github.com/anfleene/opsworks_rails_demo https://github.com/anfleene/opsworks_rails_demo_cookbooks

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Why not normal Chef?

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Everything has tradeoffs

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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

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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

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What Do You All Think?