1.
Dev-Friendly Ops
or how OpsWorks has made my life way better

2.
A Little Background
• Hi, I’m Josh
• I’m not an Ops guy
• Mostly a Ruby on Rails Dev
• .Net in a previous life but OpsWorks doesn’t
really support it
• I’ve become an Ops guy by necessity

3.
“You’re doing everything wrong.”
–Every Programmer on Twitter

4.
How We Use It
• I Work There ->
• We have ~8 clients on
OpsWorks
• This presentation is about how
we’ve done things. Not always
the “right” way.
• Tell me why I’m wrong

5.
OpsWorks 101
• Hosted Infrastructure on Amazon Web Services
• Free*
• Chef Solo / Chef Client (based on chef version)
• Evolving really really quickly
* (with purchase of everything else)

6.
Four Structures
1. Stack
2. Layer
3. App
4. Instance

7.
Stack
• Stacks are supposed to represent your entire
application and all of it’s infrastructure dependencies.
• In general each environment will be a different stack
• Production / Staging / QA / etc.
• This is not how L7 is doing it. I’ll explain why in a bit.
• Stacks set default values for future layers and
instances

8.
• Custom JSON
• This is how you define config points for your
app.
• There’s a bunch of default JSON hooks that tie
into opsworks recipes
• You can use this in custom recipes
• How you configure your database if you’re NOT
using RDS

9.
Custom Cookbook

10.
Mysql??? WTF

11.
Layer
• This is a slice of your application
• Application Server / Web Server / Database /
Task Server / etc.
• OpsWorks predefines a bunch (including Rails)
• Only 1 of each (except custom)
• This is why we don’t use stacks correctly

12.
• Layer is where you setup individual chef recipes
to run
• You can also configure settings for the layer type
• Ruby version, passenger vs nginx, bundler,
load balancer and other resources
• This will change based on the layer type and be
pretty lean on custom layers

13.
App
• Details your specific App Settings
• You CAN have multiple apps but they should rely
on the same layer settings
• aka same ruby version, web server, etc.
• Git Settings, Environment Variables, Domains, SSL
Certificates, Database Connection all goes here
• Questions vary based on layer type

14.
Instances
• This defines the metal you’ll be running on
• Inherits from Stack settings
• Size, Name, Availability Zone, SSH Access, OS all
configured here
• You can also setup autoscaling here
• Automatically spin up and down boxes based on
load or time

15.
Chef
• Every Stack can define a Custom Cookbooks Repo
• You can also use Berkshelf
• If you don’t use Berkshelf I’d make each recipe an
individual repo and submodule them in
• Also: Make your cookbooks public if you can and keep
sensitive info in environment variables
• Getting a private repo to work is possible but a total
PITA

16.
• OpsWorks publishes their default cookbooks
here:
• https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks
• Check the branch, master is useless the
branches map to chef version
• We fork this for each project and then edit
• Matt Case told me I’m a bad person for doing
this

17.
Deployment
• Goodbye Capistrano, hello mediocre Capistrano
clone.
• Same folder structure as cap
• Terrible command line support. Working on rake
tasks for this but who knows when we’ll be able to
post them
• 0 downtime deploys either need custom code or
use the Web UI

18.
• Deploy Hooks - /deploy folder in project, use for
asset compile
• Tasks - Create chef cookbook, execute as
command
• OpsWorks deploys are slower than other tools
(getting better)

19.
The Good
• DevOps for Dummies (or developers like me)
• Free*
• Great integration with AWS (obviously)
• Comprehensive API
• Really detailed documentation

20.
• Default server configs are pretty solid. (I’ve used
Rails and Node)
• Security Updates
• Sidenote: Heartbleed and Shellshock
• Amazon is actively improving the tool
• RDS, Environment Vars both added recently

21.
The Bad
• Documentation is confusing at times
• Reads like a technical manual because, well, it
is a technical manual
• Quick obsolescence
• Chef updates, new features, etc.

22.
AWS Integration
• Recently added RDS support so no more giant JSON
blocks
• CloudWatch for monitoring as well as autoscaling
• New Relic is still better for monitoring though
• IAM Security makes it easier to control access
• Servers are EC2, so you get all that stuff too
• Can map resources within opsworks (load balancers, EBS
volumes, etc.)

23.
Questions?
• Josh Schramm
• @JoshReedSchramm on the twitters
• josh.schramm@gmail.com
• Slides on slideshare and I’ll try and remember to
tweet that.