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

Answer 1

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.