What is the difference between AWS OpsWorks and my own Chef server?

Question

Is there any difference between using AWS OpsWorks, which uses Chef internally, and using my own installation of Chef?

Currently I have a my own Chef server. What are the advantages or disadvantages of replacing it with OpsWorks?

Answer 1

Some advantages of using OpsWorks if you're in a fully-AWS environment:

• Tested and maintained by AWS, so common AWS scenarios will be tested by the AWS team before upgrades to the underlying Chef framework are performed.
• You can get support for it from the AWS team.
• OpsWorks has features useful for AWS environments that they've built on top of Chef, such as Stacks and Layers. Stacks allow you to group resources together that make up a logical entity, such as "a set of webservers, two load balancers, and a database". A layer represents a component of a stack, such as a load balancer or set of webservers. A single instance or resource can belong to multiple layers.
• With the help of Stacks, Layers, and other features, OpsWorks simplifies the Orchestration/provisioning aspect of configuration management. This can be done via a standalone instance of Chef with the help of chef-metal as well; see more here.
• AWS publishes their own set of OpsWorks Cookbooks which make use of AWS-specific functionality.
• Lots of AWS-centric documentation is provided by AWS.

And some disadvantages:

• Using OpsWorks will increase your ties to AWS itself, and may make it harder to migrate your configuration to other cloud providers or datacenters later on. If you depend on AWS-specific features of OpsWorks, you won't be able to use them on your own Chef deployment later.
• You don't have the freedom to update Chef whenever you'd like to. OpsWorks will receive updates as Amazon has time to test and publish them. This could be a good thing or a bad thing--what you use will be well-tested, but it could take a while for you to get access to the most current features from new releases.
• As time goes on, OpsWorks will inevitably diverge further from mainline-Chef, so incompatibilities between the two products will likely increase.
• As OpsWorks only works inside AWS, if you have any external servers, you'll be unable to provision/configure them with the service.

Answer 2

The core benefit of OpsWorks is that it is a so-called managed service. You don't need to perform any configurations, AWS has already done it for you. Only thing you need to do is define your stack and enjoy your automation.