AWS Leeds User Group #1: OpsWorks - Automating Provisioning and Deployment

Hey Everyone,

Finally - an Amazon Web Services user group in Leeds! With the rich and diverse developer base we're lucky to have in the city, many of them using AWS products, it feels like a good time to get something regularly in the diary to share and learn about what we each do all day.

Welcome to the first of many of these sessions, the first of which will be hosted by Leeds-based Digital Agency Parallax (http://parall.ax)'s offices in the centre of town.

Schedule:

6:00pm - Quick hello and welcome. There will be some nibbles and some drinks (we have a bar which we built ourselves!). Talk amongst yourselves, make some new friends.

6:30pm - Introduction to OpsWorks (http://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/). What is it, how does it work, why do we use it.

6:45pm - Hands-on guided lab on OpsWorks (http://aws.amazon.com/opsworks/). We'll all be deploying a sample application on OpsWorks including a load balancer and an RDS database as well as a few webserver nodes.

We'll be covering: Layers, Recipes, Chef, JSON environment variables and a few other bits and pieces.

With any luck we should have some AWS user accounts setup for you to try using OpsWorks for a few hours without incurring any fees on your own account.

The idea of the guided labs is that they let everyone learn from each other and build something that functions on a basic level while following best-practice in terms of implementation.

We will have around 20 macs available to use for these sessions however do please feel free to bring your own PC/Mac/Linux/whatever along.

8:30pm - Networking

9:00pm - Close