AWS Config vs AWS OpsWorks: What are the differences?

AWS Config: Config gives you a detailed inventory of your AWS resources and their current configuration, and continuously records configuration changes. AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting; 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 Config can be classified as a tool in the "Cloud Monitoring" category, while AWS OpsWorks is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by AWS Config are:

• Configuration Visibility
• Fully Managed
• Easy to get started

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.

"Backed by Amazon" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS Config over the competitors, whereas "Devops" was stated as the key factor in picking AWS OpsWorks.

NoRedInk, Third Iron, and Urban Massage are some of the popular companies that use AWS OpsWorks, whereas AWS Config is used by Paessler AG, Trespass Technology, and BeachBody. AWS OpsWorks has a broader approval, being mentioned in 86 company stacks & 66 developers stacks; compared to AWS Config, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.