AWS OpsWorks vs Vault

AWS OpsWorks vs Vault: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS OpsWorks as "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 . On the other hand, Vault is detailed as "Secure, store, and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, API keys, and other secrets in modern computing". Vault is a tool for securely accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vault provides a unified interface to any secret, while providing tight access control and recording a detailed audit log.

AWS OpsWorks and Vault are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Secrets Management" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by AWS OpsWorks are:

• 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.

On the other hand, Vault provides the following key features:

• Secure Secret Storage: Arbitrary key/value secrets can be stored in Vault. Vault encrypts these secrets prior to writing them to persistent storage, so gaining access to the raw storage isn't enough to access your secrets. Vault can write to disk, Consul, and more.
• Dynamic Secrets: Vault can generate secrets on-demand for some systems, such as AWS or SQL databases. For example, when an application needs to access an S3 bucket, it asks Vault for credentials, and Vault will generate an AWS keypair with valid permissions on demand. After creating these dynamic secrets, Vault will also automatically revoke them after the lease is up.
• Data Encryption: Vault can encrypt and decrypt data without storing it. This allows security teams to define encryption parameters and developers to store encrypted data in a location such as SQL without having to design their own encryption methods.

"Devops" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS OpsWorks over the competitors, whereas "Secure" was stated as the key factor in picking Vault.

Vault is an open source tool with 13.2K GitHub stars and 1.98K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Vault's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, AWS OpsWorks has a broader approval, being mentioned in 73 company stacks & 19 developers stacks; compared to Vault, which is listed in 71 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.