AWS OpsWorks Stacks | General Flashcards
What is AWS OpsWorks Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks lets you manage applications and servers on AWS and on-premises. With OpsWorks Stacks, you can model your application as a stack containing different layers, such as load balancing, database, and application server. You can deploy and configure Amazon EC2 instances in each layer or connect other resources such as Amazon RDS databases. OpsWorks Stacks lets you set automatic scaling for your servers based on preset schedules or in response to changing traffic levels, and it uses lifecycle hooks to orchestrate changes as your environment scales. You run Chef recipes using Chef Solo, allowing you to automate tasks such as installing packages and programming languages or frameworks, configuring software, and more.
How is AWS OpsWorks Stacks different from AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
OpsWorks for Chef Automate is a configuration management service that helps you instantly provision a Chef server and lets the service operate it, including performing backups and software upgrades. The service offers full compatibility with Chef’s Supermarket cookbooks and recipes. It supports native Chef tools such as TestKitchen and Knife. The OpsWorks Stacks service helps you model, provision, and manage your applications on AWS using the embedded Chef solo client that is installed on Amazon EC2 instances on your behalf.
Who should use AWS OpsWorks Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
System administrators and ops-minded developers who are looking for a powerful end-to-end configuration management solution should consider AWS OpsWorks Stacks. AWS OpsWorks Stacks is targeted at DevOps users who want better management and automation tools to help them customize and control their environments. An AWS OpsWorks Stacks user typically values:
Control. AWS OpsWorks Stacks makes it easy to model all the components of your application and then configure any aspect of your application and its supporting infrastructure. With support for scripted changes using Chef recipes (learn more here) at defined stages in the application lifecycle, you have fine-grained control of your application and its interaction with related components. Your recipes can be stored with your source code, making it easy to track changes. From one-time deployments to auto scaled growth, your application will reflect your settings through its complete lifecycle.
Automation. Instead of manual steps, you specify how to scale, maintain, and deploy your applications and AWS OpsWorks Stacks performs the tasks for you. For example, AWS OpsWorks Stacks can set up instances to host your apps based on the exact configurations that you specify (code to deploy, etc.), scale your apps using load-based or time-based auto scaling, and maintain the health of your apps by detecting and replacing failed instances. AWS OpsWorks Stacks uses Chef recipes to start new app server instances, configure app server software, and deploy apps. You can also apply your own Chef recipes to make changes to your database and monitoring infrastructure.
What can users do with AWS OpsWorks Stacks that they could not do before?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks delivers a solution that lets you:
Model and support any application. You can deploy your application in the configuration you choose on Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, and Windows. AWS OpsWorks Stacks lets you model your application with layers. Layers define how to configure a set of resources that are managed together. For example, you might define a web layer for your application that consists of Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and Elastic IP addresses. You can also define the software configuration for each layer, including installation scripts and initialization tasks. When an instance is added to a layer, AWS OpsWorks Stacks automatically applies the specified configuration. Because AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports Chef recipes (visit here for details), you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr. For example, you can create an application that consists of multiple Python apps installed on Django connected to a CouchDB database.
Automate tasks. AWS OpsWorks Stacks enables you to automate management actions so that they are performed automatically and reliably. You can benefit from automatic failover, package management, Elastic Load Balancing configuration, and automatic rule-based or time-based instance scaling. Common tasks automatically handled for you, and you can also extend and customize that automation. AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports continuous configuration through lifecycle events that automatically update your instances’ configuration to adapt to environment changes, such as auto scaling events. With AWS OpsWorks Stacks there is no need to log in to several machines and manually update your configuration. Whenever your environment changes, AWS OpsWorks Stacks updates your configuration.
What kinds of applications are supported by AWS OpsWorks Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports a wide variety of application architectures, from simple web applications to highly complex custom applications.
How can I access AWS OpsWorks Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks is available through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and the AWS Command Line Interface.
What regions does AWS OpsWorks support Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
Please refer to Regional Products and Services for details of OpsWorks Stacks availability by region.
How is AWS OpsWorks Stacks different than AWS CloudFormation?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks and AWS CloudFormation both support application modeling, deployment, configuration, management, and related activities. Both support a wide variety of architectural patterns, from simple web applications to highly complex applications. AWS OpsWorks Stacks and AWS CloudFormation differ in abstraction level and areas of focus.
AWS CloudFormation is a building block service that enables customers to provision and manage almost any AWS resource via a JSON-based domain specific language. AWS CloudFormation focuses on providing foundational capabilities for the full breadth of AWS, without prescribing a particular model for development and operations. Customers define templates and use them to provision and manage AWS resources, operating systems and application code.
In contrast, AWS OpsWorks Stacks is a higher level service that focuses on providing highly productive and reliable DevOps experiences for IT administrators and ops-minded developers. To do this, AWS OpsWorks Stacks employs a configuration management model based on concepts such as stacks and layers, and provides integrated experiences for key activities like deployment, monitoring, auto-scaling, and automation. Compared to AWS CloudFormation, AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports a narrower range of application-oriented AWS resource types including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic IPs, and Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
How is AWS OpsWorks Stacks different than AWS Elastic Beanstalk?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
AWS OpsWorks Stacks is a configuration management platform while AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an application management platform.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker. Customers upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically does the rest.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks and AWS Elastic Beanstalk both automate operations but serve different needs and purposes. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is designed for developers who want to deploy web applications without worrying about operations. Developers simply upload their code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. The application will be ready to use without any infrastructure or resource configuration work on the developer’s part.
In contrast, AWS OpsWorks Stacks is an integrated configuration management platform for IT administrators and DevOps engineers who want a high degree of customization and control over operations. AWS OpsWorks Stacks users leverage Chef recipes to automate operations like software configurations, package installations, database setups, server scaling, and code deployment.
Can I manage resources created by AWS OpsWorks Stacks using other service consoles or CLIs?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
While all the resources used by OpsWorks Stacks to build your environment are visible in their respective services, in general you should manage the resources exclusively through OpsWorks Stacks to avoid side effects with OpsWorks Stacks automation. There are a few exceptions, however:
AWS OpsWorks Stacks will create and delete volumes for instances based on the configuration specified in your layer. If you want to snapshot the volumes, or manage volumes you have chosen to retain when an instance is terminated, you can do this directly with the Amazon EC2 service.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks provides security groups for your layers with defaults that match the ports required for that layer. If you want to customize the security group or create new security groups, you can do this directly with the EC2 service.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks uses key pairs that enable you to ssh into your instances. If you want to create or manage key pairs, you can do this directly with the Amazon EC2 service.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks creates default AWS IAM policies for the users you add to your stack. If you want finer grained permissions, you will need to add those permissions to the user in IAM.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks sends metrics from all your resources to Amazon CloudWatch. If you want to view these metrics or set alarms, you can do this directly with Amazon CloudWatch.
Are AWS OpsWorks Stacks instances the same as Amazon EC2 instances?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
An AWS OpsWorks Stacks instance defines an Amazon EC2 instance and its relationship with related resources, such as its availability zone, type, and associated volumes. An AWS OpsWorks Stacks instance may be represented by many Amazon EC2 instances over its lifetime, but only one at a time. This lets AWS OpsWorks Stacks consistently bind resources such as volumes and Elastic IPs with the Amazon EC2 instance when it is started.
Are there any limits to AWS OpsWorks Stacks?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
By default, you can create up to 40 Stacks, and each stack can hold up to 40 layers, 40 instances, and 40 apps. You should also be aware of other AWS limits. For example, the default AWS account limits allow you to launch up to 20 Amazon EC2 instances. If you need more resources, complete a request form and your request will be evaluated promptly. You can also install a limited number of packages through each OpsWorks Stacks layer. If you want to install a larger number of packages, use a custom cookbook to install packages.
Does AWS OpsWorks Stacks support Windows Server?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
Yes. AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports Windows Server 2012 R2
Does AWS OpsWorks Stacks support on-premises servers?
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AWS OpsWorks Stacks | Management Tools
Yes. AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports all Linux machines that can install the OpsWorks Stacks agent and have connection to AWS public endpoints.
