AWS Leeds Meetup #1 - OpsWorks
Last week we were happy to host the first Amazon Web Services user group in Leeds alongside our friends at EE. With such a diverse user base across Leeds, it was fantastic to finally get a meetup together and to discuss the many possibilities of AWS.
The event started with good conversation and food provided by our friends over at Arrosti. We made good use of the Parallax bar and then it was time to get the ball rolling. The first AWS meetup centred around OpsWorks – Automating Provisioning and Deployment.
We heard from Adam and Neil over at EE first about how they use the AWS Cloud Formation platform to manage EE’s daily infrastructure and the pros and cons of Cloud Formation as opposed to OpsWorks or Elastic Beanstalk. They explained how EE use Cloud Formation on a daily basis and executing stack commands using JSON files.
We then introduced OpsWorks and how we use it here at Parallax for our product Expose, a bit like an onion with three layers: HAProxy, Varnish and Apache with servers spread across each of them. Following that it was time for the hands-on lab. We went through creating OpsWorks layers using Chef and adding instances to those layers, and then deploying the app with an ELB (Elastic Load Balancer).
We had some great questions from the group with multiple examples of how we can use DevOps and Chef to get scripts up and running quicker and easier. The night was a great success and we met some extremely clever people, made some friends and learned a whole lot of new stuff. We had a few technical hitches along the way, but it was a good night all round.
Thanks to everyone that attended, we’ll be planning another meetup soon with Ian Massingham from AWS speaking, with suggested topics focusing on automated deployments, MSSQL hosted in EC2 compared to RDS, but we’re still open to suggestions.
Want to know more? Drop us a line.
Feel free to check out a PDF version of the documentation for your reference.