You are an AWS Cloud Architect in a big company. Your company is under a planning phase for a fresh project. The project needs to be developed and deployed completely in AWS and various deployment services are now considered. Your team members are debating on which service should be used between OpsWorks and CloudFormation. For the below options, which ones should you consider helping to choose the most appropriate service? Select 3.

Answer options:

A.The experiences of Chef and Recipe. If the team lacks Chef knowledge, OpsWorks may not be considered as the learning curve would be steep.
B.The budget of the whole project. Except for the resources such as EC2, the OpsWorks ( except Opsworks-chef automate ) and CloudFormation templates and stacks are charged differently.
C.The schedule of the project. If the timeline is not under pressure, the team can still choose to learn new skills such as Chef for OpsWorks or JSON scripting for CloudFormation.
D.Understand if the team prefers to have deeper control of infrastructure setup. If yes, CloudFormation may be a better choice. Otherwise, OpsWorks can take care of some basic configurations automatically.
E.If spot EC2 instances are required, only CloudFormation should be used as OpsWorks does not support spot instances.

Correct Answer – A, C, D
The question asks for the items that help with choosing the service of OpsWorks or CloudFormation. One major feature of OpsWorks is that it has used Chef. For OpsWorks, it is very common that a custom recipe is needed. That might be a simple task if the team has a Chef expert. But if there is not, there is a pretty steep learning curve. No matter in which way, the project’s schedule should be always considered.
 
Option A is CORRECT because the experience of Chef and Recipes is a key factor to choose OpsWorks or not.
Option B is incorrect because the OpsWorks ( except Opsworks-chef automate ) and CloudFormation templates and stacks themselves do not bring cost. You only need to pay for the resources that are set up in stacks.
Option C is CORRECT because the project’s schedule is also a key factor to consider.
Option D is CORRECT because CloudFormation is better at a lower level scripting if the team prefers to have a deeper infrastructure control with code.
Option E is incorrect: OpsWorks supports spot EC2 instances too. Refer tohttps://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/registering-spot-instances-with-aws-opsworks-stacks/.