Walkthrough: Deploy a Web App and Learn AWS OpsWorks Basics

In this walkthrough, we go through the key tasks that you need to know to use AWS OpsWorks.

Step 1. Create a simple application server stack. In this step, you create a stack, add an application server layer, launch a single instance for that layer, add an app that defines an application, and then deploy the app to your instance.

Step 2. Deploy version 2 of the application. In this step, you create a more sophisticated version of your application that uses a database server. The updated application requires some additional configuration on both the application server and the database server. To make these changes, you start by updating your app definition. Next, you add a database layer to your stack, add a cookbook that contains recipes for configuring instances to run your app, assign the recipes to the application server and database layers' lifecycle events, and then deploy the app.

Step 3. Scale out your application by adding a second instance to the application server layer and then adding an HAProxy load balancer layer to the stack to distribute traffic to the application servers.

Step 4. Add a Ganglia layer and take a brief tour of the monitoring capabilities of AWS OpsWorks.

Step 5. Clean up the resources you created so that you don't incur unwanted charges when you're finished with your stack and its instances.