AWS OpsWorks, the DevOps service from Amazon can be used for managing existing EC2 instances and on-premises servers running within the data center.
AWS OpsWorks is an application management service for performing DevOps tasks on the cloud. Operators can define application’s architecture and specification of each component including package installation, software configuration and resources such as storage. The service includes automation to scale an application based on time or load along with dynamic configuration to orchestrate changes as the environment scales.
Chris Barclay, Principal Product Manager at AWS has blogged about OpsWorks support for existing EC2 instances and on-Premises servers. Until now, customers could use OpsWorks only to manage cloud-based applications launched through OpsWorks that are deployed on AWS. With this announcement, OpsWorks can also manage existing EC2 instances created outside of OpsWorks. According to AWS, Customers with on-premises servers no longer need to operate separate application management tools or pay up-front licensing costs but can instead use OpsWorks to manage applications that run on-premises, on AWS, or that span environments. OpsWorks can configure any software that is scriptable and includes integration with AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch.
Customers need to install OpsWorks agent and command line interface before registering the servers with the cloud service. Once registered, administrators can manage OpsWorks stack, existing EC2 servers and on-premises servers from AWS Management Console.
This tool helps in monitoring servers and also performing continuous integration and continuous deployment tasks on registered workloads.