• You define layers, app, db and web.
  • Auto healing feature starts new instances within the layers of OpsWorks in case they are unhealthy.
  • You can enable load-based autoscaling to scale up your instances
  • You can start time-based instances, this allows you to schedule the start of the instance, scale for a couple of hours and then scale them back down
  • You can deploy, undeploy, run

Key use cases of OpsWorks, Elastic Beanstalk, CodeDeploy and CloudFormation

  • Use Elastic Beanstalk for Application Container where you want to quickly get code running scalable and reliably without worrying about the underlying resources. This is an application centric approach
  • Use OpsWorks for Application Resource Management where you want to run your application with the ability to customise and control software or resources. This is a DevOps automation approach
  • Use CodeDeploy for Automated Code Deployment where you want to rapidly release new features and avoid downtime during complex deployments. This is an automated deployment approach
  • Use CloudFormation for provision and manage AWS Resources where you want a simple, yet finely controllable way to model and version collections of AWS resources. This is fine grained approach
  • AWS OpsWorks Stacks users leverage Chef recipes to automate operations like software configurations, package installations, database setups, server scaling, and code deployment.