AWS OpsWorks vs AWS Beanstalk vs AWS CloudFormation?

Question

I would like to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of using AWS OpsWorks vs AWS Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation?

I am interested in a system that can be auto scaled to handle any high number of simultaneous web requests (From 1000 requests per minute to 10 million rpm.), including a database layer that can be auto scalable as well.

Instead of having a separate instance for each app, Ideally I would like to share some hardware resources efficiently. In the past I have used mostly an EC2 instance + RDS + Cloudfront + S3

The stack system will host some high traffic ruby on rails apps that we are migrating from Heroku, also some python/django apps and some PHP apps as well.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would like to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of using AWS OpsWorks vs AWS Beanstalk and AWS CLoudFormation?

The answer is: it depends.

AWS OpsWorks and AWS Beanstalk are (I've been told) simply different ways of managing your infrastructure, depending on how you think about it. CloudFormation is simply a way of templatizing your infrastructure.

Personally, I'm more familiar with Elastic Beanstalk, but to each their own. I prefer it because it can do deployments via Git. It is public information that Elastic Beanstalk uses CloudFormation under the hood to launch its environments.

For my projects, I use both in tandem. I use CloudFormation to construct a custom-configured VPC environment, S3 buckets and DynamoDB tables that I use for my app. Then I launch an Elastic Beanstalk environment inside of the custom VPC which knows how to speak to the S3/DynamoDB resources.

I am interested in a system that can be auto scaled to handle any high number of simultaneous web requests (From 1000 requests per minute to 10 million rpm.), including a database layer that can be auto scalable as well.

Under the hood, OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk use EC2 + CloudWatch + Auto Scaling, which is capable of handling the loads you're talking about. RDS provides support for scalable SQL-based databases.

Instead of having a separate instance for each app, Ideally I would like to share some hardware resources efficiently. In the past I have used mostly an EC2 instance + RDS + Cloudfront + S3

Depending on what you mean by "some hardware resources", you can always launch standalone EC2 instances alongside OpsWorks or Elastic Beanstalk environments. At present, Elastic Beanstalk supports one webapp per environment. I don't recall what OpsWorks supports.

The stack system will host some high traffic ruby on rails apps that we are migrating from Heroku, also some python/django apps and some PHP apps as well.

All of this is fully supported by AWS. OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk have optimized themselves for an array of development environments (Ruby, Python and PHP are all on the list), while EC2 provides raw servers where you can install anything you'd like.

Answer 2

OpsWorks is an orchestration tool like Chef - in fact, it's derived from Chef - Puppet, Ansible or Saltstalk. You use Opsworks to specify the state that you want your network to be in by specifying the state that you want each resource - server instances, applications, storage - to be in. And you specify the state that you want each resource to be in by specifying the value that you want for each attribute of that state. For example, you might want the Apache service to be always up and running and start on boot-up with Apache as the user and Apache as the Linux group.

CloudFormation is a json template (**) that specifies the state of the resource(s) that you want to deploy i.e. you want to deploy an AWS EC2 micro t2 instance in us-east-1 as part of VPC 192.168.1.0/24. In the case of an EC2 instance, you can specify what should run on that resource through your custom bash script in the user-data section of the EC2 resource. CloudFormation is just a template. The template gets fleshed ourt as a running resource only if you run it either through the AWS Management Console for CloudFormation or if you run the aws cli command for Cloudformation i.e. aws cloudformation ...

ElasticBeanstalk is a PAAS- you can upload the specifically Ruby/Rails, node.js or Python/django or Python/Flask apps. If you're running anything else like Scala, Haskell or anything else, create a Docker image for it and upload that Docker image into Elastic Beanstalk (*).

You can do the uploading of your app into Elastic Beanstalk by either running the aws cli for CloudFormation or you create a recipe for Opsworks to upload your app into Elastic Beanstalk. You can also run the aws cli for Cloudformation through Opsworks.

(*) In fact, AWS's documentation on its Ruby app example was so poor that I lost patience and embedded the example app into a Docker image and uploaded the Docker image into Elastic Beanstalk.

(**) As of Sep 2016, Cloudformation also supports YAML templates.