Greetings and welcome to this blog on managing Amazon AWS Services using Ansible. Many system admins and DevOps around the world have adopted the concept of automation. The organizations and businesses that have chosen to implement automation benefit from improved efficiency, cost savings, reduced errors, productivity, customer satisfaction etc. The most popular automation tools for DevOps are Puppet, Chef, Docker, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Vagrant, Git etc.

Ansible is an open-source tool used to automate the deployment and management of tasks. Here, the tasks to be automated are defined in descriptive language based on YAML.

There are many ways of managing resources on AWS. the popular ones are:

  • AWS Management Console: This is a web-based GUI from which you can access and manage resources.
  • AWS Command Line Interface (CLI): with this method, you interact with the AWS services using text-based commands. This offers a convenient method to automate tasks.
  • AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs): AWS also provides SDKs for programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, Java etc. With this, developers can integrate AWS services into their apps.

The Ansible Amazon AWS collection provides several Ansible modules to help you automate the management of AWS services. The collection is maintained by the Ansible Cloud team. The available modules can be used to manage the following:

  • Autoscaling groups
  • CloudFormation, CloudTrail, and CloudWatch
  • Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
  • DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Identity Access Manager (IAM) and Security Groups
  • Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • AWS Lambda
  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Here, we will learn how to automate Amazon AWS service management with Ansible.

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Install and Configure AWS CLI

For Ansible automation to work, we need to install and configure the AWS CLI correctly. To install the AWS CLI follow the aid provided here:

Verify the installation:

$ aws --version
aws-cli/1.29.54 Python/3.9.16 Linux/5.14.0-70.17.1.el9_0.x86_64 botocore/1.31.54

The next thing you need to do is to configure your AWS CLI. The easiest way to configure it is by using the configuration command below:

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID: MY_ACCESS_KEY
AWS Secret Access Key: MY_SECRET_KEY
Default region name [us-west-2]: eu-west-1
Default output format [None]: json

Replace all the variables correctly in the command above. To check the created file, run:

cat .aws/credentials

Step 2: Install Ansible

We will begin by installing Ansible. The required Ansible version is Ansible Core >= 2.12.0 versions. To achieve that, we will use the PIP method.

First, install Python by following the below link:

Once installed, proceed and install Ansible with the command:

sudo pip3 install ansible

Verify the installation:

$ ansible --version
ansible [core 2.15.4]
  config file = None
  configured module search path = ['/home/rocky9/.ansible/plugins/modules', '/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible
  ansible collection location = /home/rocky9/.ansible/collections:/usr/share/ansible/collections
  executable location = /usr/local/bin/ansible
  python version = 3.9.16 (main, May 29 2023, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.3.1 20221121 (Red Hat 11.3.1-4)] (/usr/bin/python3)
  jinja version = 3.1.2
  libyaml = True

Our site provides guides on how to install Ansible. See below:

Create the Ansible Hosts Inventory file

The inventory file should contain the hosts on which you want to run the automation. But here, it will be a bit different since we do not have the AWS hosts deployed. So our host file will appear as shown:

$ sudo vim /etc/ansible/hosts
[local]
localhost

For the installation with PIP, you can create the hosts file anywhere and specify it when running the playbook using the -i <path-to-file> variable

Step 3: Install Ansible Amazon AWS collection

To be able to perform the automation using Ansible, we need to have the Ansible Amazon AWS collection installed.

This can be done by running the command:

ansible-galaxy collection install amazon.aws

Once complete, we need to install all the required modules i.e. boto3 and botocore which are SDKs used to connect to AWS.

To install them run the command:

sudo pip install boto3 botocore

Now we are set to use the provided modules on the collection to automate deployments on AWS.

Step 4: Automate Amazon AWS Services Management

To automate the management of AWS services with Ansible, you need to create a playbook. This is a YAML file that contains all that you want to do on AWS. In this guide, I will show you how to create playbooks for the common tasks as shown:

a. Create or delete an EC2 key pair

The EC2 key pair is required when connecting to an EC2 instance. There are many ways of creating an EC2 key pair using the amazon.aws.ec2_key module.

First, create the playbook file:

vim key-pair.yaml

Below are some of the examples you an use. Choose one that works best for you:

  • create a new EC2 key pair, returns generated private key
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: create a new EC2 key pair, returns generated private key
      # use no_log to avoid private key being displayed into output
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_keypair
      no_log: true
      register: aws_ec2_key_pair
  • create key pair using provided key_material
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: create key pair using provided key_material
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_keypair
        key_material: 'ssh-rsa AAAAxyz...== [email protected]'
  • create key pair using key_material obtained using ‘file’ lookup plugin
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: create key pair using key_material obtained using 'file' lookup plugin
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_keypair
        key_material: "{{ lookup('file', '/path/to/public_key/id_rsa.pub') }}"
  • Create ED25519 key pair and save private key into a file
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: Create ED25519 key pair and save private key into a file
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_keypair
        key_type: ed25519
        file_name: /tmp/aws_ssh_rsa
  • creating a key pair with the name of an already existing keypair
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: try creating a key pair with name of an already existing keypair
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_existing_keypair
        key_material: 'ssh-rsa AAAAxyz...== [email protected]'
        force: false
  • remove key pair from AWS by name
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: remove key pair from AWS by name
      amazon.aws.ec2_key:
        name: my_keypair
        state: absent

In this guide, we will create the keypair from a ‘file’. 

ansible-playbook -i hosts key-pair.yaml

Sample Output:

Manage Amazon AWS Services using Ansible

You will have the pair created in your region:

Manage Amazon AWS Services using Ansible 1

b. Gather information about availability zones in AWS

It is also possible to collect information about the availability zones in AWS. This is achieved using the amazon.aws.aws_az_info module.

vim aws-info.yaml

You can use any of the below examples:

  • Gather information about all availability zones
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: Gather information about all availability zones
      amazon.aws.aws_az_info:
  • Gather information about a single availability zone
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
    - name: Gather information about a single availability zone
      amazon.aws.aws_az_info:
        filters:
          zone-name: eu-west-1a

To apply the playbook run:

ansible-playbook -i hosts aws-info.yaml

c. Provisioning EC2 Instance

To provision an EC2 instance, we will use the amazon.aws.ec2_instance module from our collection. We will also provide other required variables such as the SSH key, the Image ID, region etc. So the playbook can be created with the command:

vim ec2-playbook.yaml

Add these lines and replace values where required:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False

  tasks:

    - name: Provision an EC2 instance with a public IP address
      amazon.aws.ec2_instance:
        name: Demo
        key_name: "my_keypair"
        vpc_subnet_id: <your_subnet-id>
        instance_type: t2.nano
        security_group: default
        network:
            assign_public_ip: true
        image_id: <Your_ami-ID>
        tags:
          Environment: Testing
      register: result

In the above playbook, an instance will be created as saved by the “register” keyword in the variable named “result”.

You can also create an instance with cpu_options for example:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False

  tasks:

    - name: Provision an EC2 instance with a public IP address
      amazon.aws.ec2_instance:
        name: Demo
        key_name: "my_keypair"
        vpc_subnet_id: <your_subnet-id>
        instance_type: t2.nano
        security_group: default
        network:
            assign_public_ip: true
        image_id: <Your_ami-ID>
        tags:
          Environment: Testing
        cpu_options:
            core_count: 1
            threads_per_core: 1
      register: result

To run the playbook issue:

ansible-playbook -i hosts ec2-playbook.yaml

Sample Output:

Manage Amazon AWS Services using Ansible 2

d. Creating a Simple S3 bucket

You can also create an S3 storage using Ansible using the s3_bucket module. First, create the playbook:

vim s3-playbook.yaml

In the file, add the desired lines for your S3 storage:

- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False

  tasks:
    - name: Create new bucket
      amazon.aws.s3_bucket:
        name: mys3bucket
        state: present

Save the file and apply the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts s3-playbook.yaml

Sample Output:

Manage Amazon AWS Services using Ansible 3

Verify the creation:

$ aws s3 ls
2023-09-26 15:36:00 mys3bucket0007

To delete the bucket, change the state to absent:

$ vim s3-playbook.yaml
....
        state: absent

Then run the playbook:

ansible-playbook -i hosts s3-playbook.yaml

Verdict

This guide has provided you with steps on how to manage Amazon AWS Services using Ansible. WE have only provided a few examples to help you understand how to automate the tasks. There are many other operations you can perform using several other modules as demonstrated on the official Ansible Amazon AWS collection page. I hope this was informative.

See more on this page:

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