Modeling, customizing, and automating applications with AWS OpsWorks

Amazon Web Services launched AWS OpsWorks, an application management solution for the complete lifecycle of complex applications, including resource provisioning, configuration management, deployment, monitoring, and access control.

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, AWS OpsWorks enables developers to orchestrate all tasks required to model, deploy, scale, and maintain their applications.

Features:

Flexible – AWS OpsWorks supports a wide variety of application architectures and any software with a scripted installation. Because AWS OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, developers can use existing recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations.

Automated – AWS OpsWorks uses automation to simplify operations. Users can leverage its event-driven configuration system and rich deployment tools to efficiently manage an application over its lifetime. AWS OpsWorks supports customizable deployments, rollback, patch management, auto scaling, and auto healing. Application updates can be deployed by updating a single configuration and clicking a button, reducing the time spent on routine tasks.

Operational control – AWS OpsWorks promotes conventions and sane defaults, such as template security groups. It also supports the ability to customize any aspect of an application’s configuration. Developers can reproduce exact configurations on new instances and apply changes to all instances, ensuring consistency.

“As our customers run more and more applications on AWS they are asking for more sophisticated tools to manage their AWS resources and automate how they deploy applications,” said Scott Wiltamuth, Vice President of Developer Productivity & Tools, AWS. “Two years ago we launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk, enabling developers to quickly deploy and manage their applications in the AWS cloud. We followed that with the launch of AWS CloudFormation, providing customers an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. And now, with the launch of AWS OpsWorks, we’re providing customers with a new application management solution to automate the entire lifecycle – provisioning, deployment, configuration management, monitoring, and access control.”