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content/elsewhere/aws-opsworks-lessons-learned/index.md

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+---
+title: "AWS OpsWorks: Lessons Learned"
+date: 2013-10-04T00:00:00+00:00
+draft: false
+needs_review: true
+canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/aws-opsworks-lessons-learned/
+---
+
+We've been using Amazon's [AWS
+OpsWorks](http://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/) to manage our infrastructure
+on a recent client project. The website describes OpsWorks as
+
+> a DevOps solution for managing applications of any scale or complexity
+> on the AWS cloud.
+
+You can think of it as a middleground between something like Heroku and
+a manually configured server environment. You can also think of it as
+[Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/)-as-a-service. Before reading on,
+I'd recommend reading this [Introduction to AWS
+OpsWorks](http://artsy.github.io/blog/2013/08/27/introduction-to-aws-opsworks/),
+a post I wish had existed when I was first diving into this stuff. With
+that out of the way, here are a few lessons I had to learn the hard way
+so hopefully you won't have to.
+
+### You'll need to learn Chef {#youllneedtolearnchef}
+
+The basis of OpsWorks is [Chef](http://www.opscode.com/chef/), and if
+you want to do anything interesting with your instances, you're going to
+have to dive in, fork the [OpsWorks
+cookbooks](https://github.com/aws/opsworks-cookbooks), and start adding
+your own recipes. Suppose, like we did, you want to add
+[PDFtk](http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) to your
+servers to merge some documents:
+
+1.  Check the [OpsCode
+    Community](http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks) site for a
+    recipe.
+2.  [A recipe exists.](http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/pdftk) You
+    lucky dog.
+3.  Add the recipe to your fork, push it up, and run it.
+4.  It fails. Turns out they renamed the `gcj` package to `gcj-jdk`.
+    Fix.
+5.  It fails again. The recipe is referencing an old version of PDFtk.
+    Fix.
+6.  [Great sexy success.](http://cdn.meme.li/i/d1v84.jpg)
+
+A little bit tedious compared with `wget/tar/make`, for sure, but once
+you get it configured properly, you can spin up new servers at will and
+be confident that they include all the necessary software.
+
+### Deploy hooks: learn them, love them {#deployhooks:learnthemlovethem}
+
+Chef offers a number of [deploy
+callbacks](http://docs.opscode.com/resource_deploy.html#callbacks) you
+can use as a stand-in for Capistrano's `before`/`after` hooks. To use
+them, create a directory in your app called `deploy` and add files named
+for the appropriate callbacks (e.g. `deploy/before_migrate.rb`). For
+example, here's how we precompile assets before migration:
+
+    rails_env = new_resource.environment["RAILS_ENV"]
+
+    Chef::Log.info("Precompiling assets for RAILS_ENV=#{rails_env}...")
+
+    execute "rake assets:precompile" do
+     cwd release_path
+     command "bundle exec rake assets:precompile"
+     environment "RAILS_ENV" => rails_env
+    end
+
+### Layers: roles, but not *dedicated* roles {#layers:rolesbutnotdedicatedroles}
+
+AWS documentation describes
+[layers](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/opsworks/latest/userguide/workinglayers.html)
+as
+
+> how to set up and configure a set of instances and related resources
+> such as volumes and Elastic IP addresses.
+
+The default layer types ("PHP App Server", "MySQL") imply that layers
+distinguish separate components of your infrastructure. While that's
+partially true, it's better to think about layers as the *roles* your
+EC2 instances fill. For example, you might have two instances in your
+"Rails App Server" role, a single, separate instance for your "Resque"
+role, and one of the two app servers in the "Cron" role, responsible for
+sending nightly emails.
+
+### Altering the Rails environment {#alteringtherailsenvironment}
+
+If you need to manually execute a custom recipe against your existing
+instances, the Rails environment is going to be set to "production" no
+matter what you've defined in the application configuration. In order to
+change this value, add the following to the "Custom Chef JSON" field:
+
+    {
+     "deploy": {
+     "app_name": {
+     "rails_env": "staging"
+     }
+     }
+    }
+
+(Substituting in your own application and environment names.)
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+We've found OpsWorks to be a solid choice for repeatable, maintainable
+server infrastructure that still offers the root access we all crave.
+Certainly, it's slower out of the gate than spinning up a new Heroku app
+or logging into a VPS and `apt-get`ting it up, but the investment up
+front leads to a more sustainable system over time. If this sounds at
+all interesting to you, seriously go check out that [introduction
+post](http://artsy.github.io/blog/2013/08/27/introduction-to-aws-opsworks/).
+It's the post this post wishes it was.