Need help?
How To Create EC2 Instances Using Ansible
Welcome, 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 for many other IT needs.
So if you are using Ansible to launch 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
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.)
Once you are done with the AWS account and the User creation, you can move forward and install the required things.
- Ansible:
- Install Ansible on a RHEL/CentOS Linux based system
- $ sudo yum install Ansible
- 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
- Install Ansible using pip
- $ sudo pip install Ansible
- Once installed you can verify by Ansible –version this command.
- Install Ansible on a RHEL/CentOS Linux based system
- 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.)
- First, install pip
- $ sudo apt install python3-pip or
- $ yum install python-pip
- Now install boto
- $ pip install boto
- First, install pip
Note: There are multiple ways you can install the above packages. I have added the ones that I followed but you can install as per your knowledge.
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 it
# 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.
Where -C will check if everything is ready or not.
Ansible-playbook filename.yml
