Getting Started with Windows Stacks - AWS OpsWorks

Getting Started with Windows Stacks

Important

The AWS OpsWorks Stacks service reached end of life on May 26, 2024 and has been disabled for both new and existing customers. We strongly recommend customers migrate their workloads to other solutions as soon as possible. If you have questions about migration, reach out to the AWS Support Team on AWS re:Post or through AWS Premium Support.

Cloud-based applications usually require a group of related resources—application servers, database servers, and so on—that must be created and managed collectively. This collection of instances is called a stack. A simple application stack might look something like the following.

Diagram showing users connecting to app servers through internet, elastic IP, and load balancer.

The basic architecture consists of the following:

  • An Elastic IP address to receive user requests.

  • A load balancer to distribute incoming requests evenly across the application servers.

  • A set of application server instances, as many as needed to handle the traffic.

In addition, you typically need a way to distribute applications to the application servers, manage user permissions, and so on.

AWS OpsWorks Stacks provides a simple and straightforward way to create and manage stacks and their associated applications and resources. This chapter introduces the basics of AWS OpsWorks Stacks—along with some of its more sophisticated features—by walking you through the process of creating the application server stack in the diagram. It uses an incremental development model that AWS OpsWorks Stacks makes easy to follow: Set up a basic stack and, after it's working correctly, add components until you arrive at a full-featured implementation.

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