News

OpsWorks Management Tool Now Supports Windows

• By David Ramel
• 05/20/2015

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) added support for Windows Server 2012 R2 to its OpsWorks application management service.

OpsWorks is an integrated tool that handles all phases of an application's lifecycle, including provisioning resources, managing configuration, deployment, monitoring and controlling user access on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

Now more than two years old, OpsWorks originally ran only on Linux-based EC2 instances, eventually getting support for on-premises servers running Linux and for other technologies such as Java, Amazon RDS and Amazon Simple Workflow. Now Windows is being added to the mix.

"Today we are making OpsWorks even more useful by adding support for EC2 instances running Windows Server 2012 R2," said exec Jeff Barr in a blog post Monday. "These instances can be set up by using custom layers. The cookbooks associated with the layers can provision the instance, install packaged and custom software, and react to lifecycle events. They can also run PowerShell scripts."

In AWS terminology, layers are sets of blueprints used to set up EC2 instances in a stack, which is a grouping of related resources supporting an app, such as application servers and database servers. Cookbooks are part of the Chef management scheme that "turns infrastructure into code," helping automate tasks such as deployment, package configuration and infrastructure management.

"AWS OpsWorks was designed to simplify the process of managing the application lifecycle without imposing arbitrary limits or forcing you to work within an overly constrained model," Barr said when he introduced the product in 2013. "You have the freedom to design your application stack as you see fit."

That freedom lets staffers use the new functionality simply by declaring Windows Server 2012 R2 as the default OS when creating a new stack.

Detailed instructions on using Windows with OpsWorks, which is available now, can be found on the "Getting Started with Windows Stacks" user guide.