AWS OpsWorks vs Amazon EC2 Container Service

Overview

AWS OpsWorks

Stacks196

Followers222

Votes51

Amazon EC2 Container Service

Stacks14.6K

Followers10.2K

Votes325

Amazon EC2 Container Service vs AWS OpsWorks: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon EC2 Container Service as "Container management service that supports Docker containers". Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles. On the other hand, AWS OpsWorks is detailed as "Model and manage your entire application from load balancers to databases using Chef". Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component .

Amazon EC2 Container Service and AWS OpsWorks are primarily classified as "Containers as a Service" and "Server Configuration and Automation" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 Container Service are:

Docker Compatibility
Managed Clusters
Programmatic Control

On the other hand, AWS OpsWorks provides the following key features:

AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

"Backed by amazon" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon EC2 Container Service over the competitors, whereas "Devops" was stated as the key factor in picking AWS OpsWorks.

According to the StackShare community, Amazon EC2 Container Service has a broader approval, being mentioned in 784 company stacks & 374 developers stacks; compared to AWS OpsWorks, which is listed in 73 company stacks and 18 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on AWS OpsWorks, Amazon EC2 Container Service

Andres

Lead Senior Software Engineer at InTouch Technology

Jun 3, 2020

Decided

If you want to integrate your cluster and control end to end your pipeline with AWS tools like ECR and Code Pipeline your best option is ECS using a EC2 instance. There are pros and cons but it's easier to integrate using cloud formation templates and visual UI for approvals, etc. ECS is free, you need to pay only for the EC2 instance but unfortunately, it is not standard then you cannot use standard tools to see and manage your Kubernetes.
EKS in the other hand uses standard Kubernates definitions but you need to pay for the service and also for the EC2 instance(s) you have in your cluster.

91.7k views91.7k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS OpsWorks	Amazon EC2 Container Service
Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component	Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.;AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.;AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.;AWS OpsWorks supports any software that has a scripted installation. Because OpsWorks uses the Chef framework, you can bring your own recipes or leverage hundreds of community-built configurations.	Docker Compatibility;Managed Clusters;Programmatic Control;Task Definitions;Scheduler;Docker Repository
Statistics
Stacks 196	Stacks 14.6K
Followers 222	Followers 10.2K
Votes 51	Votes 325
Pros & Cons
Pros 32 Devops 19 Cloud management	Pros 100 Backed by amazon 72 Familiar to ec2 53 Cluster based 42 Simple API 26 Iam roles
Integrations
No integrations available	Docker Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to AWS OpsWorks, Amazon EC2 Container Service?

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Container Engine takes care of provisioning and maintaining the underlying virtual machine cluster, scaling your application, and operational logistics like logging, monitoring, and health management.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

Containerum

Containerum is built to aid cluster management, teamwork and resource allocation. Containerum runs on top of any Kubernetes cluster and provides a friendly Web UI for cluster management.

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 Container Service are:

Docker Compatibility
Managed Clusters
Programmatic Control

On the other hand, AWS OpsWorks provides the following key features:

AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

"Backed by amazon" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon EC2 Container Service over the competitors, whereas "Devops" was stated as the key factor in picking AWS OpsWorks.

AWS OpsWorks vs Amazon EC2 Container Service