OpsWorks is a system that essentially takes care of installing and running a selected orchestration environment for us. Once we have selected our solution, we need to install and configure the correct agent or client on the operating system that will be managed by OpsWorks. We can introduce the client straight away to the AMI for any newly created EC2 instances that we deploy. We can also retrieve downloadable installer packages and install the agent or client of existing EC2 instances or on-premise virtual and physical servers. Once the operating system starts, the agent or client will be connected to the centralized configuration management environment and changes can be applied. 

At the time of writing, two options exist when configuring an OpsWorks cluster:

• AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate
• AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise