AWS OpsWorks (retired)
AWS OpsWorks no longer exists. All three offerings reached end of life during 2024, after which the console, API, CLI and CloudFormation resource types were withdrawn in every Region:
| Offering | End of life |
|---|---|
| AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise | 31 March 2024 |
| AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate | 5 May 2024 |
| AWS OpsWorks Stacks | 26 May 2024 |
This page exists so that a reader arriving from an old runbook, a bookmark or a search result learns that the service is gone rather than following instructions that cannot be carried out.
What it did
Section titled “What it did”OpsWorks was a managed configuration-management service. It modelled an application as a stack (a collection of resources supporting one service or application, scoped to a single Region) divided into layers — a web layer, a middleware layer, a data layer — with instances belonging to layers. Chef recipes or Puppet manifests then configured the instances: package installation, code deployment, configuration files, backups.
What to use instead
Section titled “What to use instead”AWS directed OpsWorks customers to AWS Systems Manager, and that remains the answer for the operational half of what OpsWorks did:
- Systems Manager State Manager for keeping instance configuration at a desired state.
- Systems Manager Patch Manager for OS and application patching.
- Systems Manager Automation for runbooks that replace Chef recipes used as operational tasks.
- Systems Manager Inventory for the software and configuration inventory OpsWorks reported.
For the stack-and-layer modelling, the replacement is infrastructure as code — CloudFormation, AWS CDK or Terraform — with immutable images built by EC2 Image Builder rather than instances configured after launch. For teams still committed to Chef or Puppet, both products are available from their vendors and can run on EC2; AWS no longer hosts a managed control plane for either.
See AWS Config for the configuration-recording and compliance side, which OpsWorks never covered.