# Using chef with ec2 or through aws opswork

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/using-chef-with-ec2-or-through-aws-opswork/6767>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [July 7, 2015, 4:11pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/using-chef-with-ec2-or-through-aws-opswork/6767 "2015-07-07T16:11:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Joseph\_Djomeda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/13edae/32.png) [@Joseph\_Djomeda](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Joseph_Djomeda)\
**Post date:** [July 7, 2015, 4:11pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/using-chef-with-ec2-or-through-aws-opswork/6767/1 "2015-07-07T16:11:20Z")

</div>

Hello Guys,

I wanted to pick your mind about some strategic usage of opsworks vs chef  
or opsworks with chef. More and more my company is comfortable in running  
our servers on the cloud, our own and boxes we manage for few clients.  
We have aws and azure account and very soon google cloud. We use more aws  
anyways and are very much ok with it.

DevOps department is pretty young and we are at getting it pick up . I got  
approval for using chef but I have been reading about aws Opswork and their  
Codedeploy which can add a lot to our bottom line. Considering Opswork is  
based on chef has been a major factor in adopting chef for our online nodes  
and ansible for our local and experiments etc.

Trying opswork didn’t feel like I have an overall control over the farm  
event thought it’s been advertised as very flexible.

I am trying not get a wrong opinion so I would like to ask if you have a  
similar case and what did you finally decided on and why

## Best Regards,

Joseph Kodjo-Kuma Djomeda  
check out my pains at : [www.mycodingpains.com](http://www.mycodingpains.com)  
We become what we think about ourselves…

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Shubby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Shubby](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Shubby)\
**Post date:** [July 7, 2015, 4:35pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/using-chef-with-ec2-or-through-aws-opswork/6767/2 "2015-07-07T16:35:36Z")

</div>

Joseph,  
OpsWorks is a very nice service, we use and enjoy it a lot, along with  
Elastic Beanstalk. OpsWorks is easier to figure out than Elastic Beanstalk,  
especially if you already have an understanding of Chef. OpsWorks does have  
downsides, though, such as:

1. While it's essentially a Chef Server in the cloud, not all features of a  
true Chef server are exposed.
2. You can't use Knife, at all, ever.
3. There are no regular roles, but you can use role cookbooks to achieve  
similar results.
4. There are no environments, but you can pass a custom JSON blob to an  
OpsWorks stack, to achieve similar results, minus an attribute hierarchy or  
cookbook version requirements.
5. No data bags.
6. The evolution of the OpsWorks API is slower than that of Chef -- while  
Chef is up to version 12.4, OpsWorks is still using Chef 11.10 and it's  
unclear when they'll start supporting Chef 12 (they kind of do now, but  
only for Windows stacks).
7. If you want to build your OpsWorks instance directly from cookbooks  
stored in GitHub, you must set up your repo in a specific manner and keep a  
bunch of cookbooks in a single repo.,
8. If you wish to use a certain cookbook (let's use the apache2 cookbook  
[https://github.com/svanzoest-cookbooks/apache2](https://github.com/svanzoest-cookbooks/apache2) as an example) and it  
already exists in [GitHub - aws/opsworks-cookbooks: Chef Cookbooks for the AWS OpsWorks Service](https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks), you must use  
the OpsWorks version. Trying to use the official/community release will  
result in an error.

At the same time, we also use Chef's Hosted Chef service, to get the whole  
package when needed, but OpsWorks is usually sufficient. Lastly, you always  
have the option of running your own Chef Server in-house (or in EC2).

On a different note, you mentioned that you use Chef for online nodes and  
Ansible for local dev/experiments. I might suggest that you switch entirely  
to one or the other for both online nodes and local development, so you  
don't have to do the same work twice. If you're going to use OpsWorks, you  
might as well standardize on Chef. Chef is very local development-friendly,  
with tools such as Chef Zero, Test Kitchen and VirtualBox.

I hope this helps!

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Joseph Djomeda [joseph@djomeda.com](mailto:joseph@djomeda.com) wrote:

> Hello Guys,
> 
> I wanted to pick your mind about some strategic usage of opsworks vs chef  
> or opsworks with chef. More and more my company is comfortable in running  
> our servers on the cloud, our own and boxes we manage for few clients.  
> We have aws and azure account and very soon google cloud. We use more aws  
> anyways and are very much ok with it.
> 
> DevOps department is pretty young and we are at getting it pick up . I got  
> approval for using chef but I have been reading about aws Opswork and their  
> Codedeploy which can add a lot to our bottom line. Considering Opswork is  
> based on chef has been a major factor in adopting chef for our online nodes  
> and ansible for our local and experiments etc.
> 
> Trying opswork didn't feel like I have an overall control over the farm  
> event thought it's been advertised as very flexible.
> 
> I am trying not get a wrong opinion so I would like to ask if you have a  
> similar case and what did you finally decided on and why
> 
> ## Best Regards,
> 
> Joseph Kodjo-Kuma Djomeda  
> check out my pains at : [www.mycodingpains.com](http://www.mycodingpains.com)  
> We become what we think about ourselves........

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Yoshi\_Spendiff](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/yoshi_spendiff/32/13_2.png) [@Yoshi\_Spendiff](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Yoshi_Spendiff)\
**Post date:** [July 7, 2015, 4:36pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/using-chef-with-ec2-or-through-aws-opswork/6767/3 "2015-07-07T16:36:45Z")

</div>

We went through an evaluation period recently of whether to use Opsworks or  
regular ec2 nodes with vanilla Chef.

The conclusion we came to is that Opsworks functions really, really well  
for anything that can be done by the existing nodes types available in  
Opsworks. It was extremely quick to configure and scale and the lifecycle  
events make it extremely easy to tag in recipes where you need them to get  
clustering working.

The reason we didn't end up going with Opsworks though is that it's less  
flexible than writing your own recipes from scratch. For a web stack it  
makes perfect sense, but then if you want to add one off servers like a  
Splunk server or some sort of utility server then how does that fit in the  
stack? In that case you'd put it outside the stack so you're now having to  
use normal Chef infrastructure/code anyway. It felt like Opsworks was a  
tool for a specific purpose, a really good tool, but it didn't make sense  
to try and cover all infrastructure with it.  
I think if you just wanted to run your web stack on Opsworks and then have  
stand alone nodes using other Chef recipes that could work well.

Another thing to take note on Opworks is that the development is glacial.  
Amazon Linux and Ubuntu are the only OSes available, Chef server 11.10 is  
the latest version available to Unix hosts and using the default recipes  
there's not always up to date version of compilers available (for example  
on Amazon Linux the only php version available is 5.3). When we started  
developing in the trial for Opsworks we found that we were doing a bunch of  
extra work to get the systems to a state that was the same as just using  
the latest versions of community cookbooks. The older chef version meant  
that the latest versions of community cookbooks wouldn't work on Opsworks  
so we had to fill in the blanks ourselves.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Joseph Djomeda [joseph@djomeda.com](mailto:joseph@djomeda.com) wrote:

> Hello Guys,
> 
> I wanted to pick your mind about some strategic usage of opsworks vs chef  
> or opsworks with chef. More and more my company is comfortable in running  
> our servers on the cloud, our own and boxes we manage for few clients.  
> We have aws and azure account and very soon google cloud. We use more aws  
> anyways and are very much ok with it.
> 
> DevOps department is pretty young and we are at getting it pick up . I got  
> approval for using chef but I have been reading about aws Opswork and their  
> Codedeploy which can add a lot to our bottom line. Considering Opswork is  
> based on chef has been a major factor in adopting chef for our online nodes  
> and ansible for our local and experiments etc.
> 
> Trying opswork didn't feel like I have an overall control over the farm  
> event thought it's been advertised as very flexible.
> 
> I am trying not get a wrong opinion so I would like to ask if you have a  
> similar case and what did you finally decided on and why
> 
> ## Best Regards,
> 
> Joseph Kodjo-Kuma Djomeda  
> check out my pains at : [www.mycodingpains.com](http://www.mycodingpains.com)  
> We become what we think about ourselves........

--  
Yoshi Spendiff  
Ops Engineer  
Indochino  
Mobile: +1 778 952 2025  
Email: [yoshi.spendiff@indochino.com](mailto:yoshi.spendiff@indochino.com)