AWS OpsWorks
AWS OpsWorks was a configuration management service within Amazon Web Services that used Chef and Puppet to automate how servers were configured, deployed, and managed in the cloud or on-premises.
Key points
- AWS OpsWorks has reached end of life and is fully retired: OpsWorks Stacks reached end of life on May 26, 2024, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate reached end of life on May 5, 2024, and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise reached end of life on March 31, 2024. The console, API, CLI, and CloudFormation resources for these services have been disabled in all AWS Regions for new and existing customers alike.
- Existing Amazon EC2 instances that were managed by OpsWorks Stacks remain in customers’ accounts after end of life, but can no longer be controlled through OpsWorks itself.
- AWS’s recommended alternative is AWS Systems Manager, specifically its Application Manager capability — AWS provides a CloudFormation-based migration script to move OpsWorks Stacks applications there, unlocking features OpsWorks Stacks never supported, such as Graviton instance types, gp3 EBS volumes, newer operating systems, and integration with EC2 Auto Scaling and load balancers. Customers who want to keep running their existing instances without migrating everything at once can instead detach the stacks, layers, and instances from OpsWorks and manage them directly via EC2 and Systems Manager.
- Used Chef and Puppet for configuration management automation.
- Automated how servers were configured, deployed, and managed, whether in the cloud or on-premises.
- Helped improve network security by restricting requests.
- Provided a simple, flexible way to create and manage stacks and applications: provision AWS resources, manage their configuration, deploy applications to them, and monitor their health.
- Distinct from AWS CloudFormation, which provisions and replicates infrastructure from reusable templates rather than managing ongoing server configuration via Chef/Puppet.