AWS CodeDeploy vs AWS OpsWorks: What are the differences?

AWS CodeDeploy: Coordinate application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications; AWS OpsWorks: Model and manage your entire application from load balancers to databases using Chef. Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component .

AWS CodeDeploy can be classified as a tool in the "Deployment as a Service" category, while AWS OpsWorks is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by AWS CodeDeploy are:

• AWS CodeDeploy fully automates your code deployments, allowing you to deploy reliably and rapidly
• AWS CodeDeploy helps maximize your application availability by performing rolling updates across your Amazon EC2 instances and tracking application health according to configurable rules
• AWS CodeDeploy allows you to easily launch and track the status of your deployments through the AWS Management Console or the AWS CLI

On the other hand, AWS OpsWorks provides the following key features:

• AWS OpsWorks lets you model the different components of your application as layers in a stack, and maps your logical architecture to a physical architecture. You can see all resources associated with your application, and their status, in one place.
• AWS OpsWorks provides an event-driven configuration system with rich deployment tools that allow you to efficiently manage your applications over their lifetime, including support for customizable deployments, rollback, partial deployments, patch management, automatic instance scaling, and auto healing.
• AWS OpsWorks lets you define template configurations for your entire environment in a format that you can maintain and version just like your application source code.

"Automates code deployments" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CodeDeploy over the competitors, whereas "Devops" was stated as the key factor in picking AWS OpsWorks.

According to the StackShare community, AWS OpsWorks has a broader approval, being mentioned in 73 company stacks & 18 developers stacks; compared to AWS CodeDeploy, which is listed in 57 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.