What is AWS OpsWorks?

AWS OpsWorks is one of major services of DevOps that is responsible for the management of highly vigorous application development that continuously upgrades the changes in minimum time. OpsWorks is helpful in monitoring various DevOps related activities and providing codes as well. From the infrastructure’s prospective, the continuous maintenance of server, data, and application is necessary. For the continuous management, DevOps serves its responsibilities to improve performance.

Why AWS OpsWorks is Necessary?

The need of OpsWorks can be easily understood by considering an example; let’s say, there is a large number of servers continuously operating and providing services to the customer. If you are required to change some of the activities on these servers, then you have two options: One way is to conduct the changes manually, which will take too much time. The other way in AWS is to use the services of OpsWorks that provides the configuration changes continuously with the operating servers and save time as well.

Features of OpsWorks

Some of the OpsWorks feature are as follows:

• Highly scalable

• Is easy to start and use

• Saves a lot of time

• Provides the continuous change of activities

• Highly flexible and secure

Components of AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks focuses on the following while configuring management of services.

• Stacks and Layers: Stacks include the code service, configuration of file and many other things while configuring an application. Whereas, layers are the installation of applications

• Instances: It provides a platform to perform computation for certain applications and also provides the resources for computation

• Applications: Applications are present on top of instances

• CookBooks: CookBooks are the collection of configuration files that define the services

Situation

A company has a number of servers that need a continuous monitoring tool and deployment criteria. Now the company has a requirement of deploying a new web application. It is required to conduct the deployment and management in minimum time. How can this be done?

Solution

A more scalable and flexible way to deploy web application is to use AWS OpsWorks for reliable achievement. The procedure for the deployment of web application is defined in the following step-by-step guide.

Step-by-Step Guide

 1. Log in to AWS Management Console and go to “OpsWorks”.

 2. Click on “Go to OpsWorks Stacks”. Then, click on “ Add your first stack”.

 3. Select “Chef 11 Stack” for your stack creation. Enter the stack name and select the OS to configure the stack.

 4. Leave the Advanced Options as default and click “Add stack”.

 5. Once the stack has been created, click on “Add a layer” to add static web hosting layer.

 6. Select the layer type and here, there is no load balancer available. So create an Elastic Load Balancer (Classic) with allowed HTTP traffic in the security group of ELB.

7. Now, the created ELB appears in the layer, select that load balancer. Also, select instance shutdown behavior then click “Add layer”.

 8. Go to “Instances” and click on “Add an instance”.

 9. Enter the name of the instance, size and scaling type.

 10. Click on “Add Instance”. In the beginning, the instance is stopped, so you need to start it.

Similarly, add another instance and start it. Now, both your instances have become online.

 11. Now, go to “App” layer to add an application in the stack. Click on “Add an app”.

 12. Enter the name, type of application and the repository location where your code is stored for the website.

 13.  Click on “Add App”.

 14. After adding an application, you need to deploy it, so click on “deploy”. As we want to deploy, we must select the deploy command and click on “Deploy”.

 15. Now, the deployment of your app is running. After a successful deployment, go to the “Instances” layer and copy the public IP address and paste in the browser. 

 16. Your static website will now open in the browser.

 17. You can also do the monitoring of your application by going into the “Monitoring” layer where usage is shown in the form of a graph.

https://github.com/IPSpecialist/DevOps-CloudFormation

Conclusion

With AWS OpsWorks, companies can easily create the required web application. In addition to this, since OpsWorks provides a number of configuration management possibilities, the monitoring requirement for the deployed web application will also be fulfilled with the monitoring layer tool.