AWS OpsWorks vs CloudFormation

Question

I want to understand the exact limitations of OpsWorks - things that we simply may not be able to do or not optimally. That would require to go to the next level - CloudFormation. Of course we can use OpsWorks + CloudFormation - get best of both worlds - a best practice.

Some limitations of OpsWorks that I am aware of are - it cant provision everything - like EMR, S3 etc - but have never found on exhaustive list . Also OpsWorks the AutoScaling configuration has limitations. And CloudFormation lets us version control the environment unlike OpsWorks. Do understand that there is good amount of overlap and CloudFormation does add to complexity.

There was a previous discussion but the demarcations were not made clear.

Answer 1

OpsWorks is a totally different service from CloudFormation.

OpsWorks is focused at managing applications layered as stacks, and taking advantadge of chef recipes for setting up and deploying applications.

CloudFormation is a descriptive language to create sets of AWS infrastructure.

It may look obvious, but the thing is that whenever you prefer to manage an application and its deployment cycle, the OpsWorks service is better suited. You can of course use cloud formation to define entire applications and layers in OpsWorks and that will allow you to replicate entire applications layer sets (for test environments and so)

The only good way to learn the boundaries of every service is using them for your needs, then you will find where Opsworks is strong and where Cloudformation complements or allows you to automate your Opsworks setups.

About versioning, CF lets you version the infrastructure stack, which may have nothing to do with the version of code that you are managing through opsworks.

regards

Answer 2

In many cases CloudFormation is used with OpsWorks; where CloudFormation is used to provision the infrastructure and OpsWorks to configure the resources created. OpsWorks (via Chef or Puppet) provides a richer set of abilities when it comes to configuring the application stack then the simple shell scripting offered by CloudFormation. So, generally CloudFormation is used to deploy AWS resources, and OpsWorks is used to do the detailed configuration of the application(s)/operating system(s).

In some ways one can say that CloudFormation is focused more with a collection of AWS infrastructure resources rather than the application itself; but as you have alluded to some things can be done by both services interchangeably.

This AWS link may help where it states:

“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.”

and this is certainly not a limitation for CloudFormation.