From Dev on your Laptop to Prod in the Cloud: How XL Deploy and Amazon AWS OpsWorks take away the pain

As a developer, I want the pain the effort required to go from a code change to a running version of my app (which I can test) to be as minimal as possible. Luckily, there are a whole bunch of frameworks and tools that will give me an on-demand environment: Vagrant, Terraform, all the virtualization and cloud management platforms and now, of course, containers and all the related orchestration frameworks too. But I really also don't want to have to re-tool my environment provisioning scripts or container definitions every time I add or change some aspect of my app. And there are other use cases to consider: if I'm working in a plane, I'll (for a little while longer, at least ;-)) want an offline version using Vagrant, Docker or so; when I want to test a bigger setup in e.g. EC2 that is a bit more like my production environment, I'll use something like AWS OpsWorks. Using XL Deploy in combination with OpsWorks can make both of these problems go away. Even better, I can delegate the problem of defining, testing, updating etc. my environments to an Ops or platform team. I then only have the "app layer" - the part I'm actually working on - to worry about:

• I can use the standard OpsWorks ens defined by my platform team, or simply pick up off-the-shelf community blueprints
• I can use other environments when I need to, such a local Vagrant or Docker env when I'm offline
• When my environments are updated with security patches, I don't even notice: and because I don't have to own my env setup unless I want to (it's not specific to my app, after all), I can leave all the boring maintenance stuff to someone else
• My app layer - the stuff I care about - is deployed to my environments automatically, even if they are differently sized or configured

Result: I can get my app running without hassles whenever I need to - locally, in the cloud, in whichever size environment I need. I don't have to worry about any of the usual environment- or OS-maintenance stuff, and I also don't have to write and maintain deployment scripts, manifests, cookbooks, playbooks, Dockerfiles or anything like that for my app.

Here's what it looks like in action:

1. An OpsWorks stack defined as an Environment Template in XL Deploy:2. XL Deploy invoking OpsWorks to instantiate the stack:3. New environment and infrastructure in XL Deploy:4. XL Deploy automatically deploying the app layer to OpsWorks:If you'd like to give this a try, you can download XL Deploy, get the XL Deploy OpsWorks plugin and sign up for OpsWorks right away!