In this article, you will learn to launch an EC2 instance using Ansible from the local machine. Before starting, you can understand Ansible as a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
So if you are using Ansible to launch an EC2 instance you can set this up with CI/CD, dynamic creation on the instance. There are many use cases you can implement using Ansible. So let’s get started.
For working on Ansible we need to first set up a few things,
- AWS user account
- Ansible
- Python
- Boto
For creating the AWS account just go to the Amazon AWS server and follow the signup process. Once the AWS account gets created you need to create the IAM user (As we will need a secret key and secret ID).
Open the AWS Console, search for IAM (Identity and Access Management) and follow these steps to create a user and take note of the Access Key and Secret Key that will be used by Ansible to set up the instances. (For account access just give Programmatic access as of now.) You can simply connect with a Python development company like Mindbowser that would handle some of your hassles.
Now if you go to the Amazon console you will see the server is launched successfully. Also with this, you are all set for Deploying Go App on AWS EC2 Server.
Ansible
1. Install Ansible on a RHEL/CentOS Linux based system
- $ sudo yum install Ansible
2. Install Ansible on a Debian/Ubuntu Linux based system
- $ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
- $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:Ansible/Ansible
- $ sudo apt-get update
- $ sudo apt-get install Ansible
3. Install Ansible using pip
- $ sudo pip install Ansible
- $ Once installed you can verify by Ansible –version this command.
Python
- $ sudo apt-get update
- $ sudo apt-get install python3.6
- $ You can follow this link for more details.
Boto
Boto is a Python package which provides an interface to AWS.
1. First, install pip
- $ sudo apt install python3-pip or
- $ yum install python-pip
2. Now install boto
- $ pip install boto
We Developed A Proof Pilot With The Support Of Python Technology
Now open a terminal and create a file with the extension .yml or .ymal, add below script and save.
# Basic provisioning example - name: Ansible test hosts: localhost tasks: - name: launching AWS instance using Ansible ec2: key_name: aws_instance_Ansible instance_type: t2.micro image: ami-0dacb0c129b49f529 region: us-east-2 wait: yes group: Ansible count: 1 vpc_subnet_id: default assign_public_ip: yes aws_access_key: ***********xxxxxxxx Aws_secret_key: ***********xxxxxxxx
Hosts
Add [webserver] localhost in /etc/Ansible/hosts file as my internet is running on the local server. If the file does not exist, create one at the same location, then add.
You can select the instance type whichever you want to launch. Go to EC2 dashboard -> Launch instance -> Check instance type.
Image
Add your aws_access_key and aws_secret_key which you got from IAM user creation. The rest are the basic details. If you want more details you can visit the Ansible official website. Now our Ansible file is ready.
Run below command to check whether Ansible is ready to launch EC2 or not.
Ansible-playbook -C filename.yml
Where -C will check if everything is ready or not.
Ansible-playbook filename.yml
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Conclusion
So, we are done with creating a basic EC2 server using Ansible. I hope this will help you to use Ansible in your upcoming projects. If you have questions about how Ansible makes AWS instances ask in the comment section.
