# Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [February 20, 2013, 4:20pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651 "2013-02-20T16:20:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 13\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Denis\_Haskin1](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/denis_haskin1/32/584_2.png) [@Denis\_Haskin1](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Denis_Haskin1)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 4:20pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/1 "2013-02-20T16:20:28Z")

</div>

"Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."

> **[AWS OpsWorks – Configuration Management - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)**
>
> Looking to automate configuration management on AWS? AWS OpsWorks provides three offerings to help you automate operational tasks on AWS or on-premises.

This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)

Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.

--  
Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![JJ\_Asghar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e99b99/32.png) [@JJ\_Asghar](https://discourse.chef.io/u/JJ_Asghar)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 4:33pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/2 "2013-02-20T16:33:23Z")

</div>

They had a twitter post about it.

No press release that I've seen yet ☹

Best Regards,  
JJ Asghar  
e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876

From: Denis Haskin \<[denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)[mailto:denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
To: chef \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

"Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."

> **[AWS OpsWorks – Configuration Management - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)**
>
> Looking to automate configuration management on AWS? AWS OpsWorks provides three offerings to help you automate operational tasks on AWS or on-premises.

This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition. Interesting discussion at ycombinator: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)

Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.

--  
Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![KC\_Braunschweig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ea5d25/32.png) [@KC\_Braunschweig](https://discourse.chef.io/u/KC_Braunschweig)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 4:39pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/3 "2013-02-20T16:39:02Z")

</div>

I'm curious to hear about how it works for people too. Hopefully you really  
get to use Chef in ways it was intended, not just some sorta-based-on-Chef  
workflow. I fear it could be like when I looked at RightScale a while back  
and "uses Chef" meant you could kinda run a really old version of chef-solo  
wrapped up in some custom stuff and that's it. Then again, higher  
expectations of AWS are probably justified.

KC

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 8:33 AM, JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)wrote:

> They had a twitter post about it.
> 
> No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> 
> Best Regards,  
> JJ Asghar  
> e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> 
> From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> 
> [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> 
> This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> 
> Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.
> 
> --  
> Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christopher\_Brown](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/christopher_brown/32/559_2.png) [@Christopher\_Brown](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Christopher_Brown)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 4:39pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/4 "2013-02-20T16:39:52Z")

</div>

Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation, we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement with OpsWorks.  
There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press and marketing team shed some light on this.

Cheers,  
Chris

From: JJ Asghar \<[jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

They had a twitter post about it.

No press release that I've seen yet ☹

Best Regards,  
JJ Asghar  
e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876

From: Denis Haskin \<[denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)[mailto:denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
To: chef \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

"Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."

> **[AWS OpsWorks – Configuration Management - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)**
>
> Looking to automate configuration management on AWS? AWS OpsWorks provides three offerings to help you automate operational tasks on AWS or on-premises.

This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition. Interesting discussion at ycombinator: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)

Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.

--  
Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Peter\_Norton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/dec6dc/32.png) [@Peter\_Norton](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Peter_Norton)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 4:51pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/5 "2013-02-20T16:51:21Z")

</div>

OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using  
cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a  
practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download  
the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including  
registering with a chef server. This is really promising.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com) wrote:

> Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> with OpsWorks.  
> There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press  
> and marketing team shed some light on this.
> 
> Cheers,  
> Chris
> 
> From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> They had a twitter post about it.
> 
> No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> 
> Best Regards,  
> JJ Asghar  
> e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> 
> From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> 
> [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> 
> This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> [AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef | Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> 
> Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.
> 
> --  
> Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![johnmartinez](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/johnmartinez/32/558_2.png) [@johnmartinez](https://discourse.chef.io/u/johnmartinez)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 5:06pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/6 "2013-02-20T17:06:08Z")

</div>

We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very  
interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef  
the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's  
available, that's for sure!

-john

On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com) wrote:

OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using  
cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a  
practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download  
the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including  
registering with a chef server. This is really promising.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com) wrote:

> Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> with OpsWorks.  
> There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press  
> and marketing team shed some light on this.
> 
> Cheers,  
> Chris
> 
> From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> They had a twitter post about it.
> 
> No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> 
> Best Regards,  
> JJ Asghar  
> e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> 
> From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> 
> [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> 
> This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> 
> Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.
> 
> --  
> Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Morgan\_Blackthorne](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/morgan_blackthorne/32/100_2.png) [@Morgan\_Blackthorne](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Morgan_Blackthorne)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2013, 5:38pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/7 "2013-02-20T17:38:59Z")

</div>

Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of  
AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there  
was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot  
time, or via autoscaling/etc.

--  
~_~ StormeRider ~_~

"Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we  
are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."

(from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")

On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez [john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)wrote:

> We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very  
> interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef  
> the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's  
> available, that's for sure!
> 
> -john
> 
> On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)  
> wrote:
> 
> OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using  
> cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a  
> practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download  
> the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including  
> registering with a chef server. This is really promising.
> 
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> 
> > Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> > we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> > with OpsWorks.  
> > There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> > #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press  
> > and marketing team shed some light on this.
> > 
> > Cheers,  
> > Chris
> > 
> > From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > 
> > They had a twitter post about it.
> > 
> > No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> > 
> > Best Regards,  
> > JJ Asghar  
> > e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> > 
> > From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> > To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > 
> > "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> > community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> > 
> > [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> > 
> > This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> > Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> > [AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef | Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> > 
> > Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about  
> > it.
> > 
> > --  
> > Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Jesse\_Campbell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/jesse_campbell/32/251_2.png) [@Jesse\_Campbell](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Jesse_Campbell)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 1:51pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/8 "2013-02-21T13:51:46Z")

</div>

According to the amazon pages, this is built against  
[https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the  
middle of 2010.

I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious  
modifications  
b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will be  
entirely foreign

oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big chunk  
of work.

i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne  
[stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)wrote:

> Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of  
> AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there  
> was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot  
> time, or via autoscaling/etc.
> 
> --  
> ~_~ StormeRider ~_~
> 
> "Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we  
> are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."
> 
> (from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")
> 
> On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)
> 
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez [john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)wrote:
> 
> > We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very  
> > interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef  
> > the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's  
> > available, that's for sure!
> > 
> > -john
> > 
> > On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)  
> > wrote:
> > 
> > OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using  
> > cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a  
> > practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download  
> > the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including  
> > registering with a chef server. This is really promising.
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> > 
> > > Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> > > we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> > > with OpsWorks.  
> > > There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> > > #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the  
> > > press and marketing team shed some light on this.
> > > 
> > > Cheers,  
> > > Chris
> > > 
> > > From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> > > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > 
> > > They had a twitter post about it.
> > > 
> > > No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> > > 
> > > Best Regards,  
> > > JJ Asghar  
> > > e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> > > 
> > > From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> > > To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > 
> > > "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> > > community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> > > 
> > > [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> > > 
> > > This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> > > Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> > > [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> > > 
> > > Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about  
> > > it.
> > > 
> > > --  
> > > Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephane\_Jourdan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/stephane_jourdan/32/582_2.png) [@Stephane\_Jourdan](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Stephane_Jourdan)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 3:00pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/9 "2013-02-21T15:00:54Z")

</div>

Hi,

I confirm it's running a 0.9.15.3 fork of chef from Peritor, last updated 2  
years ago.  
Deployed cookbooks from Opscode looks quite dated too (think of a 0.9  
Apache cookbook for example).

I'm still experimenting but am somewhat disappointed for my usage.

For those who wonder, you get

- an equivalent of a standard chef-repo,
- versionned by date and symlinked to "current" for usage.
- a Gemfile for the hellish deps for such old software reqs
- about 35 cookbooks, some AWS custom, many not
- ruby1.8 ro run chef-solo (ie.: _ruby1.8  
/opt/aws/opsworks/current/bin/chef-solo -j  
/var/lib/aws/opsworks/chef/2013-02-21-13-58-55-01.json -c  
/opt/aws/opsworks/current/conf/solo.rb_)

Cheers,  
Stef

Stephane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
Green Alto / 10, Rue Chaptal / 34000 Montpellier, FR  
+33(0)411 934 340 / +33(0)684 531 618

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jesse Campbell [hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com) wrote:

> According to the amazon pages, this is built against  
> [https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
> which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the  
> middle of 2010.
> 
> I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
> a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious  
> modifications  
> b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will be  
> entirely foreign
> 
> oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big  
> chunk of work.
> 
> i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃
> 
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne \<  
> [stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)\> wrote:
> 
> > Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of  
> > AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there  
> > was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot  
> > time, or via autoscaling/etc.
> > 
> > --  
> > ~_~ StormeRider ~_~
> > 
> > "Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we  
> > are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."
> > 
> > (from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")
> > 
> > On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez [john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)wrote:
> > 
> > > We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very  
> > > interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef  
> > > the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's  
> > > available, that's for sure!
> > > 
> > > -john
> > > 
> > > On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)  
> > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using  
> > > cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a  
> > > practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download  
> > > the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including  
> > > registering with a chef server. This is really promising.
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> > > > we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> > > > with OpsWorks.  
> > > > There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> > > > #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the  
> > > > press and marketing team shed some light on this.
> > > > 
> > > > Cheers,  
> > > > Chris
> > > > 
> > > > From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> > > > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > 
> > > > They had a twitter post about it.
> > > > 
> > > > No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> > > > 
> > > > Best Regards,  
> > > > JJ Asghar  
> > > > e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> > > > 
> > > > From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> > > > To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > 
> > > > "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> > > > community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> > > > 
> > > > [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> > > > 
> > > > This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> > > > Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> > > > [AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef | Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> > > > 
> > > > Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about  
> > > > it.
> > > > 
> > > > --  
> > > > Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christopher\_Brown](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/christopher_brown/32/559_2.png) [@Christopher\_Brown](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Christopher_Brown)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 3:10pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/10 "2013-02-21T15:10:26Z")

</div>

We plan to work with Amazon on this support, but expressing your opinions and concerns directly to them would help as well. If you want to see better & more modern Chef support in OpsWork, let Amazon know on their AWS forums and we'll circle back with them.

Thanks,  
Chris

From: Stéphane Jourdan \<[sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)[mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:00 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

Hi,

I confirm it's running a 0.9.15.3 fork of chef from Peritor, last updated 2 years ago.  
Deployed cookbooks from Opscode looks quite dated too (think of a 0.9 Apache cookbook for example).

I'm still experimenting but am somewhat disappointed for my usage.

For those who wonder, you get

- an equivalent of a standard chef-repo,
- versionned by date and symlinked to "current" for usage.
- a Gemfile for the hellish deps for such old software reqs
- about 35 cookbooks, some AWS custom, many not
- ruby1.8 ro run chef-solo (ie.: ruby1.8 /opt/aws/opsworks/current/bin/chef-solo -j /var/lib/aws/opsworks/chef/2013-02-21-13-58-55-01.json -c /opt/aws/opsworks/current/conf/solo.rb)

Cheers,  
Stef

Stephane Jourdan \<[sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)[mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)\>  
Green Alto / 10, Rue Chaptal / 34000 Montpellier, FR  
+33(0)411 934 340 / +33(0)684 531 618

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jesse Campbell \<[hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com)[mailto:hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com)\> wrote:  
According to the amazon pages, this is built against [https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the middle of 2010.

I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious modifications  
b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will be entirely foreign

oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big chunk of work.

i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne \<[stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)[mailto:stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)\> wrote:  
Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot time, or via autoscaling/etc.

--  
~_~ StormeRider ~_~

"Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."

(from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")

On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez \<[john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)[mailto:john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)\> wrote:  
We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's available, that's for sure!

-john

On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton \<[pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)[mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)\> wrote:

OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including registering with a chef server. This is really promising.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown \<[cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)[mailto:cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)\> wrote:  
Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation, we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement with OpsWorks.  
There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press and marketing team shed some light on this.

Cheers,  
Chris

From: JJ Asghar \<[jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

They had a twitter post about it.

No press release that I've seen yet ☹

Best Regards,  
JJ Asghar  
e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722tel:512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876tel:512.977.5876

From: Denis Haskin \<[denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)[mailto:denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
To: chef \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

"Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."

> **[AWS OpsWorks – Configuration Management - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)**
>
> Looking to automate configuration management on AWS? AWS OpsWorks provides three offerings to help you automate operational tasks on AWS or on-premises.

This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition. Interesting discussion at ycombinator: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)

Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.

--  
Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephane\_Jourdan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/stephane_jourdan/32/582_2.png) [@Stephane\_Jourdan](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Stephane_Jourdan)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 3:18pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/11 "2013-02-21T15:18:23Z")

</div>

That would be great, I think a more modern OpsWorks and a much better  
integration with Chef (hosted or not) could be a real winner or at least  
interest another kind of users than the ones already currently using Chef  
or even EC2.

So I'll take a look at what's said on the AWS forums !

Stephane

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com) wrote:

> We plan to work with Amazon on this support, but expressing your  
> opinions and concerns directly to them would help as well. If you want to  
> see better & more modern Chef support in OpsWork, let Amazon know on their  
> AWS forums and we'll circle back with them.
> 
> Thanks,  
> Chris
> 
> From: Stéphane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:00 AM  
> To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon  
> AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I confirm it's running a 0.9.15.3 fork of chef from Peritor, last updated  
> 2 years ago.  
> Deployed cookbooks from Opscode looks quite dated too (think of a 0.9  
> Apache cookbook for example).
> 
> I'm still experimenting but am somewhat disappointed for my usage.
> 
> For those who wonder, you get
> 
> - an equivalent of a standard chef-repo,
> - versionned by date and symlinked to "current" for usage.
> - a Gemfile for the hellish deps for such old software reqs
> - about 35 cookbooks, some AWS custom, many not
> - ruby1.8 ro run chef-solo (ie.: _ruby1.8  
> /opt/aws/opsworks/current/bin/chef-solo -j  
> /var/lib/aws/opsworks/chef/2013-02-21-13-58-55-01.json -c  
> /opt/aws/opsworks/current/conf/solo.rb_)
> 
> Cheers,  
> Stef
> 
> Stephane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
> Green Alto / 10, Rue Chaptal / 34000 Montpellier, FR  
> +33(0)411 934 340 / +33(0)684 531 618
> 
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jesse Campbell [hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > According to the amazon pages, this is built against  
> > [https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
> > which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the  
> > middle of 2010.
> > 
> > I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
> > a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious  
> > modifications  
> > b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will  
> > be entirely foreign
> > 
> > oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big  
> > chunk of work.
> > 
> > i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne \<  
> > [stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)\> wrote:
> > 
> > > Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of  
> > > AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there  
> > > was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot  
> > > time, or via autoscaling/etc.
> > > 
> > > --  
> > > ~_~ StormeRider ~_~
> > > 
> > > "Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we  
> > > are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."
> > > 
> > > (from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")
> > > 
> > > On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez [john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)wrote:
> > > 
> > > > We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks  
> > > > very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for  
> > > > Jenkins+CFN+Chef the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it  
> > > > when it's available, that's for sure!
> > > > 
> > > > -john
> > > > 
> > > > On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)  
> > > > wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves  
> > > > using cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already  
> > > > have a practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to  
> > > > download the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there,  
> > > > including registering with a chef server. This is really promising.
> > > > 
> > > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation,  
> > > > > we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement  
> > > > > with OpsWorks.  
> > > > > There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> > > > > #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the  
> > > > > press and marketing team shed some light on this.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Cheers,  
> > > > > Chris
> > > > > 
> > > > > From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> > > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> > > > > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > > 
> > > > > They had a twitter post about it.
> > > > > 
> > > > > No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> > > > > 
> > > > > Best Regards,  
> > > > > JJ Asghar  
> > > > > e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> > > > > 
> > > > > From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> > > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> > > > > To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > > 
> > > > > "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of  
> > > > > community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> > > > > 
> > > > > [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> > > > > 
> > > > > This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> > > > > Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> > > > > [AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef | Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> > > > > 
> > > > > Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode  
> > > > > about it.
> > > > > 
> > > > > --  
> > > > > Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christopher\_Brown](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/christopher_brown/32/559_2.png) [@Christopher\_Brown](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Christopher_Brown)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 3:24pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/12 "2013-02-21T15:24:39Z")

</div>

Good to hear that. We also think there's lots of opportunity here, and the current distance between the Chef underlying OpsWorks (older version based on solo) and modern server-based Chef (Hosted or otherwise) could be confusing and certainly isn't as powerful. We'd like to raise that bar for everyone. Let me know if you need any help if you engage in discussion on the forums.

Cheers,  
Chris

From: Stéphane Jourdan \<[sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)[mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:18 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

That would be great, I think a more modern OpsWorks and a much better integration with Chef (hosted or not) could be a real winner or at least interest another kind of users than the ones already currently using Chef or even EC2.

So I'll take a look at what's said on the AWS forums !

Stephane

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Christopher Brown \<[cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)[mailto:cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)\> wrote:  
We plan to work with Amazon on this support, but expressing your opinions and concerns directly to them would help as well. If you want to see better & more modern Chef support in OpsWork, let Amazon know on their AWS forums and we'll circle back with them.

Thanks,  
Chris

From: Stéphane Jourdan \<[sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)[mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:00 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

Hi,

I confirm it's running a 0.9.15.3 fork of chef from Peritor, last updated 2 years ago.  
Deployed cookbooks from Opscode looks quite dated too (think of a 0.9 Apache cookbook for example).

I'm still experimenting but am somewhat disappointed for my usage.

For those who wonder, you get

- an equivalent of a standard chef-repo,
- versionned by date and symlinked to "current" for usage.
- a Gemfile for the hellish deps for such old software reqs
- about 35 cookbooks, some AWS custom, many not
- ruby1.8 ro run chef-solo (ie.: ruby1.8 /opt/aws/opsworks/current/bin/chef-solo -j /var/lib/aws/opsworks/chef/2013-02-21-13-58-55-01.json -c /opt/aws/opsworks/current/conf/solo.rb)

Cheers,  
Stef

Stephane Jourdan \<[sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)[mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)\>  
Green Alto / 10, Rue Chaptal / 34000 Montpellier, FR  
+33(0)411 934 340tel:%2B33(0)411%20934%20340 / +33(0)684 531 618tel:%2B33(0)684%20531%20618

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jesse Campbell \<[hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com)[mailto:hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com)\> wrote:  
According to the amazon pages, this is built against [https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the middle of 2010.

I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious modifications  
b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will be entirely foreign

oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big chunk of work.

i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne \<[stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)[mailto:stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)\> wrote:  
Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot of AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if there was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at say... boot time, or via autoscaling/etc.

--  
~_~ StormeRider ~_~

"Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than we are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."

(from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")

On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez \<[john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)[mailto:john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)\> wrote:  
We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for Jenkins+CFN+Chef the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it when it's available, that's for sure!

-john

On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton \<[pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)[mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)\> wrote:

OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves using cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already have a practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to download the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there, including registering with a chef server. This is really promising.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown \<[cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)[mailto:cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)\> wrote:  
Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of speculation, we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some involvement with OpsWorks.  
There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the press and marketing team shed some light on this.

Cheers,  
Chris

From: JJ Asghar \<[jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

They had a twitter post about it.

No press release that I've seen yet ☹

Best Regards,  
JJ Asghar  
e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)[mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722tel:512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876tel:512.977.5876

From: Denis Haskin \<[denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)[mailto:denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)\>  
Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
To: chef \<[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)[mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)\>  
Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?

"Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."

> **[AWS OpsWorks – Configuration Management - Amazon Web Services](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)**
>
> Looking to automate configuration management on AWS? AWS OpsWorks provides three offerings to help you automate operational tasks on AWS or on-premises.

This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition. Interesting discussion at ycombinator: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)

Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode about it.

--  
Denis Haskin

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Stephane\_Jourdan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/stephane_jourdan/32/582_2.png) [@Stephane\_Jourdan](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Stephane_Jourdan)\
**Post date:** [February 21, 2013, 4:01pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/peoples-thoughts-on-amazon-aws-opsworks/3651/13 "2013-02-21T16:01:39Z")

</div>

for those interested, I opened a discussion on the subject here on the  
OpsWorks AWS forum:

> **[Forums](https://repost.aws/forums?newRedirect=1&origin=%2Fthread.jspa&threadID=117400)**
>
> Forums

Cheers,  
Stef

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com) wrote:

> Good to hear that. We also think there's lots of opportunity here, and  
> the current distance between the Chef underlying OpsWorks (older version  
> based on solo) and modern server-based Chef (Hosted or otherwise) could be  
> confusing and certainly isn't as powerful. We'd like to raise that bar for  
> everyone. Let me know if you need any help if you engage in discussion on  
> the forums.
> 
> Cheers,  
> Chris
> 
> From: Stéphane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
> Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:18 AM  
> To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on  
> Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> 
> That would be great, I think a more modern OpsWorks and a much better  
> integration with Chef (hosted or not) could be a real winner or at least  
> interest another kind of users than the ones already currently using Chef  
> or even EC2.
> 
> So I'll take a look at what's said on the AWS forums !
> 
> Stephane
> 
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> 
> > We plan to work with Amazon on this support, but expressing your  
> > opinions and concerns directly to them would help as well. If you want to  
> > see better & more modern Chef support in OpsWork, let Amazon know on their  
> > AWS forums and we'll circle back with them.
> > 
> > Thanks,  
> > Chris
> > 
> > From: Stéphane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
> > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Date: Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:00 AM  
> > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > Subject: [chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon  
> > AWS OpsWorks?
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I confirm it's running a 0.9.15.3 fork of chef from Peritor, last updated  
> > 2 years ago.  
> > Deployed cookbooks from Opscode looks quite dated too (think of a 0.9  
> > Apache cookbook for example).
> > 
> > I'm still experimenting but am somewhat disappointed for my usage.
> > 
> > For those who wonder, you get
> > 
> > - an equivalent of a standard chef-repo,
> > - versionned by date and symlinked to "current" for usage.
> > - a Gemfile for the hellish deps for such old software reqs
> > - about 35 cookbooks, some AWS custom, many not
> > - ruby1.8 ro run chef-solo (ie.: _ruby1.8  
> > /opt/aws/opsworks/current/bin/chef-solo -j  
> > /var/lib/aws/opsworks/chef/2013-02-21-13-58-55-01.json -c  
> > /opt/aws/opsworks/current/conf/solo.rb_)
> > 
> > Cheers,  
> > Stef
> > 
> > Stephane Jourdan [sjourdan@greenalto.com](mailto:sjourdan@greenalto.com)  
> > Green Alto / 10, Rue Chaptal / 34000 Montpellier, FR  
> > +33(0)411 934 340 / +33(0)684 531 618
> > 
> > On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Jesse Campbell [hikeit@gmail.com](mailto:hikeit@gmail.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > According to the amazon pages, this is built against  
> > > [https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable](https://github.com/peritor/chef/commits/scalarium-0.8-stable)  
> > > which appears to be a fork of chef that hasn't been updated since the  
> > > middle of 2010.
> > > 
> > > I'm just going to take a gamble and say that  
> > > a) most of my company's custom cookbooks won't work without serious  
> > > modifications  
> > > b) things like 'search' and 'environments' and 'platform\_family' will  
> > > be entirely foreign
> > > 
> > > oh yeah, and it doesn't support centos at all, so there's another big  
> > > chunk of work.
> > > 
> > > i think i'll stick with the nice shiny chef 11, thanks very much 😃
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Morgan Blackthorne \<  
> > > [stormerider@gmail.com](mailto:stormerider@gmail.com)\> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Interesting, I'm definitely curious to hear more about it. I do a lot  
> > > > of AMI-based bootstrapping of Chef and it would be very interesting if  
> > > > there was a more integrated solution where I could assign the role at  
> > > > say... boot time, or via autoscaling/etc.
> > > > 
> > > > --  
> > > > ~_~ StormeRider ~_~
> > > > 
> > > > "Every world needs its heroes [...] They inspire us to be better than  
> > > > we are. And they protect from the darkness that's just around the corner."
> > > > 
> > > > (from Smallville Season 6x1: "Zod")
> > > > 
> > > > On why I hate the phrase "that's so lame"... [http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS](http://bit.ly/Ps3uSS)
> > > > 
> > > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:06 AM, John Martinez [john@johnmartinez.com](mailto:john@johnmartinez.com)wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > We have a similar workflow, but using Hosted Chef. OpsWorks looks  
> > > > > very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's a replacement for  
> > > > > Jenkins+CFN+Chef the way we've set things up. I'll be playing more with it  
> > > > > when it's available, that's for sure!
> > > > > 
> > > > > -john
> > > > > 
> > > > > On Feb 20, 2013, at 8:51 AM, Peter Norton [pn+chef-list@knewton.com](mailto:pn+chef-list@knewton.com)  
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > OpsWorks is so similar to what we ended up building for ourselves  
> > > > > using cloudformation and chef-solo that I wish we'd waited. We already  
> > > > > have a practice of downloading a small tarball that chef-solo will use to  
> > > > > download the appropriate bundle and run the roles we've defined there,  
> > > > > including registering with a chef server. This is really promising.
> > > > > 
> > > > > On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Brown [cb@opscode.com](mailto:cb@opscode.com)wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > > Just to allay people's fears and maybe stem the tide of  
> > > > > > speculation, we've worked with Amazon off-and-on a few times and have some  
> > > > > > involvement with OpsWorks.  
> > > > > > There will probably be more visible press soon, as we get closer to  
> > > > > > #ChefConf 2013 ([http://chefconf.opscode.com/](http://chefconf.opscode.com/)). I'll make sure the  
> > > > > > press and marketing team shed some light on this.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Cheers,  
> > > > > > Chris
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > From: JJ Asghar [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com)  
> > > > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:33 AM  
> > > > > > To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > > Subject: [chef] Re: Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > They had a twitter post about it.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > No press release that I've seen yet ☹
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Best Regards,  
> > > > > > JJ Asghar  
> > > > > > e: [jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com](mailto:jj.asghar@peopleadmin.com) | c: 512.619.0722 | o: 512.977.5876
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > From: Denis Haskin [denis@constantorbit.com](mailto:denis@constantorbit.com)  
> > > > > > Reply-To: "[chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)" [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > > Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:20 AM  
> > > > > > To: chef [chef@lists.opscode.com](mailto:chef@lists.opscode.com)  
> > > > > > Subject: [chef] Peoples' thoughts on Amazon AWS OpsWorks?
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > "Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds  
> > > > > > of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr."
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > [Configuration Management - AWS OpsWorks - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/)
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > This is apparently based on Scalarium, from AWS' Peritor acquisition.  
> > > > > > Interesting discussion at ycombinator:  
> > > > > > [AWS OpsWorks - Flexible Application Management in the Cloud Using Chef | Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243196)
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Haven't really dug into it yet. Surprised nothing from OpsCode  
> > > > > > about it.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > --  
> > > > > > Denis Haskin