Creating a Stack in AWS OpsWorks

Introduction

AWS OpsWorks allows you to orchestrate the separate parts of your application using managed instances of Chef or Puppet to automate operations. The main building block of AWS OpsWorks is a stack. A stack allows you to construct a model of your application with different layers. In a typical application, these can be represented as the web, application, and database layers. 

With AWS OpsWorks you can provision EC2 instances in each layer and configure these instances using Chef to automate repetitive operations like installing and configuring software. This advantage comes from the use of AWS OpsWorks cookbooks, published by AWS. These cookbooks are open source and you can build your own or mix and match to fit the needs of your application. 

In this lab step, you will create an OpsWorks stack that will be used to model a simple PHP application.

Instructions

1. In the AWS Management Console search bar, enter OpsWorks, and click the OpsWorks result under Services:

2. Click Go to OpsWorks Stacks:

3. To start creating a stack, click Add your first stack:

4. Ensure Chef 11 stack is selected for the stack type:

5. Configure the following fields:

• Stack name: Enter 
• VPC: Select the  VPC
• Default operating system: Select Amazon Linux 2017.09

You can accept the default values of the fields not mentioned above.

6. Click Advanced>> to expand the additional fields and configure the following: 

•  IAM role: Select aws-opsworks-service-role
• Default IAM instance profile: Select the instance profile beginning with aws-opsworks-ec2-role

7. Click Add stack:

Summary

In this lab step, you created an AWS OpsWorks Stack that utilizes Chef 11 and the Amazon Linux operating system.