AWS OpsWorks vs Mina: What are the differences?

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 ; Mina: Really fast deployer and server automation tool. Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

AWS OpsWorks and Mina can be primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.

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, Mina provides the following key features:

• Safe deploys. New releases are built on a temp folder. If the deploy script fails at any point, the build is deleted and it’d be as if nothing happened.
• Locks. Deploy scripts rely on a lockfile ensuring only one deploy can happen at a time.
• Works with anything. While Mina is built with Rails projects it mind, it can be used on just about any type of project deployable via SSH, Ruby or not.

"Devops" is the top reason why over 27 developers like AWS OpsWorks, while over 5 developers mention "Easy, fast and light weight" as the leading cause for choosing Mina.

Mina is an open source tool with 4.05K GitHub stars and 453 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Mina'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 Mina, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.