Bloody shame, OpsWorks was a great service in my experience. I built a few clusters with it before Kubernetes and terraform were a thing.
That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.
OpsWorks was based on a really old fork of the Chef code. I did quite a bit of Chef in my day, but it really only made sense in a physical hardware/VMware virtual instance kind of environment, where you had these "pets" that you needed to keep configured the right way.
Once you got up to the levels of AWS CAFO-style "cattle" instances, it stopped making so much sense. With autoscaling, you need your configuration to be baked into the AMI before it boots, otherwise you're going to be in a world of hurt as you try to autoscale to keep up with the load but then you spend the first thirty minutes of the instance lifetime doing all the configuration after the autoscale event.
A wise Chef once told me that "auto scaling before configuration equals a sad panda", or something to that effect.
Chef did try to come up with a software solution that would work better in an AWS Lambda/Kubernetes style environment, and I was involved with that community for a while, but I don't know what ever became of that. I probably haven't logged into those Slack channels since 2017.
IMO, there are much better tools for managing your systems on AWS. CDK FTW!
That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.
RIP OpsWorks.