AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate provides a fully managed Chef server and suite of automation tools that give you workflow automation for continuous deployment, automated testing for compliance and security, and a user interface that gives you visibility into your nodes and their status. The Chef server gives you full stack automation by handling operational tasks such as software and operating system configurations, package installations, database setups, and more. The Chef server centrally stores your configuration tasks and provides them to each node in your compute environment at any scale, from a few nodes to thousands of nodes. OpsWorks for Chef Automate is completely compatible with tooling and cookbooks from the Chef community and automatically registers new nodes with your Chef server.

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Mark Rambow Software Development Manager
Configuration Management with
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate
Configuration Management on AWS
Kai Rubarth Product Manager

2. What to expect from this session?
Understand how configuration management lets you refer
to your infrastructure as code
Making your life easier with AWS OpsWorks for Chef
Automate
Live Demo use configuration management effectively in
AWS

3. Why should I care?
- AWS makes it easy to get new infrastructure when
needed
- The rapidly changing environment makes automation
necessary
- You also need better insights
- How to stay compliant and secure?
- How to keep track of how your infrastructure is
configured?

4. What is configuration management?
A practice in which code is used to define and maintain the
state of both new and existing resources throughout their
entire life cycle.

5. Configuration management lets you
• Store your configuration information in one place
• Repeatedly and reliably setting up new instances
• Changes are only done in one place
• Create dev and test environments that mimic production

6. Manage the state of your infrastructure
- Resources you manage are on instance level
- Configuration files, packages, patches, SSH key, etc.
- Application environments
- like everything you need to run for your Rails App
- Common challenges are
- removing permission from all hosts
- Change log-rotate or cron jobs across your fleet
- Install updates
- Patch all your instances

8. What is Chef?
• Refer to your infrastructure as code (cookbooks & recipes)
• Consistently install, configure, manage, deploy and scale
applications
• Align resources with specific policies
• Save time by automating manual tasks

9. How does it look like?
• A trusted relationship
• Clients execute run lists
• Clients report telemetry back
• Server provides data about all
clients
• The Chef client can react to
changes by using Chef
search.
Config A Config B

10. How does it look like?
• The Chef client pulls
configuration updates from the
Chef server every 30 minutes.
• The Chef client will only make
configuration changes when
the node is out of spec.
Config A Config B

11. Support for community tools
• ChefDK
• Knife
• Chef Client
• Community cookbooks and recipes
• TestKitchen

12. Chef recipe example – configure Apache
# Install Apache and start the service.
service ‘apache2’ do
listen_ports ['81', '82']
action [:enable, :start]
end
# Add the site configuration.
remote_directory '/var/www/html' do
source 'teaser_page’
action :create
end
service "apache2" do
action :restart
end
.....

13. Get visibility into the state of your nodes
Visibility – A view into convergence, compliance, cookbooks, recipes and more.

14. Not only a Configuration Management tool
Workflow – A continuous delivery pipeline of infrastructure and applications.

15. Not only a Configuration Management tool
Compliance - Discovery and analysis of compliance risks across environments

16. AWS OpsWorks
for Chef Automate

17. What is AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate?
The place you go to for configuration management on AWS
Offers a fully managed Chef Automate server
OpsWorks

18. How can I create an AWS managed Chef server?
Easy to get started, get a Chef Automate server in 10 minutes.

19. What else can I set up?
Setup a weekly maintenance window
•Automatic security updates
•Automatic Chef version upgrades

20. What else can I set up?
Setup a daily/weekly backup schedule

21. What is left for me to do?
Nothing, this is a fully managed configuration management
service:
-Automatic backups
-Automatic security updates
-Automatic Chef software updates
You can focus on writing cookbooks and recipes that meet
your needs.

22. What other benefits do I get from the service?
• Automatic instance to Chef server registration
• Secure and easy scaling using Auto Scaling Groups
• No separate license fees, only pay for what you use
• Supports both Amazon EC2 and on-prem resources
• Best practices, AWS support and guidance

23. Where does it come in the tool chain?
• Bootstrap instances with the right configuration
• Update the configuration of running instances
• Assure instances comply with a pre-defined policy
• A part of your Continuous Integration and Continuous
Delivery pipeline

24. Live Demo

25. How do I get started?
• Grab some community cookbooks
• https://supermarket.chef.io/
 Learn more
• https://www.chef.io/automate/
• Get started
• https://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/

26. Thank you!