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Mastering AWS with amazon.aws 7.0: A Dive into New Modules for Enhanced Security and Seamless Migrations

As the technology landscape continues to evolve, the latest release of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for amazon.aws introduces a suite of powerful modules that redefine the boundaries of automation within Amazon Web Services (AWS) while redefining how organizations approach security deployments and seamless migrations within the AWS ecosystem.

In our previous blog post, "What's New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 7.0.0," we presented the latest release, outlining the changes, new features and newly supported modules. In this blog post, we embark on an exploration of two interesting use cases that highlight the capabilities of these new Ansible-supported modules included in the amazon.aws 7.0 release. Let’s dive into it!

Looking to get started with Ansible for Amazon Web Services?   Check out the Amazon Web Services Guide Try out the hands-on Interactive Labs Read the e-book: Using automation to get the most from your public cloud

 

Use Case #1: Implementing Security Best Practices and Access Control for AWS Resources

Security in AWS is more critical than ever before, and the collection for AWS, amazon.aws 7.0, is up to the challenge with a host of new Identity and Access Continue reading

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What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 7.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Ansible Content Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 7.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous features, plugins, bug fixes, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws collection. Let's go through some of them! 

Looking to get started with Ansible for Amazon Web Services?   Check out the Amazon Web Services Guide Try out the hands-on Interactive Labs Read the e-book: Using automation to get the most from your public cloud

 

Forward-looking Changes

Much of our work in the 7.0.0 release has been focused on the following areas:

• Enhancing several modules from the upstream community.
• Promoting modules to being formally supported by Red Hat.
• Improving the overall quality of the collection code.
• Releasing various new enhancements and clarifying support policies.

 

New Modules

This release brings with it a number of new supported modules that have been Continue reading

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What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

 

Forward-looking Changes

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

New Python Support Policy

On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and Continue reading

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What’s New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what's new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

Forward-looking Changes

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

New Python Support Policy

On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS Continue reading

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Take Ansible validated content to the next level with Event-Driven Ansible

Cloud computing has become an essential factor in IT transformation and business innovation. The highly dynamic nature of cloud environments, where new resources are constantly being added and removed, poses new challenges. One of the main challenges organizations face is the lack of visibility into the cloud environment. As cloud computing continues to grow in complexity, it can be challenging to keep track of all the different resources and applications that make up the infrastructure. This lack of visibility can make it difficult to maintain security policies and configurations, making the infrastructure vulnerable to attacks.

In this context, another challenge is the need to maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards. Depending on the industry and location, there may be specific regulations that organizations must comply with when storing and processing sensitive data in the cloud. Ensuring compliance can be a time-consuming and costly process.

Without automation and proactive monitoring, cloud environments are difficult and complex to manage. In this context, Ansible offers a plethora of tools, such as Ansible validated content and Event-Driven Ansible, that can help you to successfully mitigate security threats while also streamlining your operations and reducing costs.

In this blog post, we will show you Continue reading

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What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.cloud 0.3.0

Last year, we made available an experimental alpha Ansible Content Collection of generated modules using the AWS Cloud Control API to interact with AWS services. Although the Collection is not intended for production, we are constantly trying to improve and extend its functionality and achieve its supportability in the future.

In this blog post, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 0.3.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.

 

Forward-looking Changes

Much of our work in release 0.3.0 focused on releasing several new enhancements, clarifying supportability policies, and extending the automation umbrella by generating new modules. Let’s deep dive into it!

 

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.cloud Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.28.0 and boto3<1.25.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. 

 

New Ansible Support Policy

This Collection release drops support for  ansible-core<2.11. In particular, Ansible Core 2.10 and Ansible 2.9 are not supported. For more information, visit Ansible release documentation.

 

Continue reading

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Maximize your hybrid cloud mastery with the Ansible validated content

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In today's environment, mastering the hybrid cloud has become a key factor in IT transformation and business innovation. In this context, network complexity can be a nightmare, especially as organizations expand their infrastructure and embrace hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies. Without automation, monitoring and controlling network routing, infrastructure, and security in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment are difficult to manage. Furthermore, identifying and resolving network performance issues in these infrastructures are quite challenging.

In one of the previous blogs, titled  “Crank up your automation with Ansible validated content”, Nuno Martins highlighted the Ansible validated content included in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3.

In this blog post, we will show you how to leverage the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection for hybrid cloud to troubleshoot network performance issues and maximize your hybrid cloud mastery. In particular, we’ll use the aws_troubleshooting.connectivity_troubleshooter role.

First, let’s take a look at  the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection.

 

Deep dive on cloud.aws_troubleshooting

Let’s take a deep look at  the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection. This Collection includes a variety of Ansible Roles to help troubleshoot AWS resources. The Collection includes the following roles:

• cloud.aws_troubleshooting.troubleshoot_rds_connectivity - A role to troubleshoot RDS Continue reading

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What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 4.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the amazon.aws Collection brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights on what’s new in the 4.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.

 

Forward-looking Changes

With the recent release, we have included numerous bug fixes and features that further solidify the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

 

New Features Highlights

Some of the new features available in this Collection release are listed below.

 

EC2 Subnets in AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure to on-premise locations, reducing latency and data processing needs. EC2 subnets can be created on AWS Outposts by specifying the AWS Outpost Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the in the creation phase.

The new outpost_arn option of the ec2_vpc_subnet module allows you to do that.

- name: Create an EC2 subnet on an AWS Outpost
  amazon.aws.ec2_vpc_subnet:
    state: present
    vpc_id: vpc-123456
    cidr: 10.1.100.0/24
    outpost_arn: "{{ outpost_arn }}"
    tags:
      "Environment": "production"

 

New EC2 Instance Continue reading

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Exploring New Possibilities with the AWS Cloud Control Collection

We recently made available an experimental alpha Collection of generated modules using the AWS Cloud Control API for interacting with AWS Services. This content is not intended for production in its current state. We are making this work available because we thought it was important to share our research and get your feedback. 

In this post, we’ll highlight how to try out this alpha release of the new amazon.cloud content Collection.

 

The AWS Cloud Control API

Launched in September 2021 and featured at AWS re:Invent, AWS Cloud Control API is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that provides five operations for developers to create, read, update, delete, and list (CRUDL) resources and make it easy for developers and partners to manage the lifecycle of AWS and third-party services in a standard way.

The Cloud Control API provides support for hundreds of AWS resources today with support for more existing AWS resources across services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in the coming months. 

AWS delivers a broad and deep portfolio of cloud services. It started with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and grew over Continue reading

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Boost your cloud-native deployments with Red Hat OpenShift

Cloud-native deployments are becoming the new normal. Being able to keep full control of the application lifecycle (deployment, updates, and integrations) is a strategic advantage. This article will explain how the latest release of the Ansible Content Collection for Red Hat OpenShift takes the redhat.openshift Collection to the next level, improving the performance of large automation tasks. 

 

Red Hat OpenShift collection at a glance

The latest release of the redhat.openshift Collection  introduces Ansible Turbo mode. Ansible Turbo mode enhances the performance of Ansible Playbooks when manipulating many Red Hat OpenShift objects. This is done by reusing existing API connections to handle new incoming requests, removing the overhead of creating a new connection for each request. 

 

A real-world scenario

Red Hat OpenShift has become a leading platform that can handle many workloads in large enterprises dealing with multi-tenancy clusters. These are great candidates when different users, teams, and/or organizations are looking to run and operate in a shared environment.  

One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is the capability to quickly and easily create and destroy resources (e.g., namespace, ConfigMaps, Pod). Even with relatively light usage, deploying each one Continue reading

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What’s New: The Ansible AWS Collection 2.0 Release

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the Ansible amazon.aws Collection brings a set of fresh features to build, manage and govern various public and hybrid cloud use cases while accelerating the process from development to production.

In this blog post, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 2.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.

 

Forward-looking Changes

Much of our work in the 2.0 release has been focused in the following areas:

• Enhancing several modules from the upstream community
• Promoting modules to being formally supported by Red Hat 
• Releasing various new enhancements and clarifying supportability policies

New boto3/botocore Support Policy

Starting with the 2.0 amazon.aws Collection release, it is now the Collection’s policy to support the versions of botocore and boto3 that were released 12 months prior to the most recent major Collection release, as well as following semantic versioning (for example, 2.0.0, 3.0.0). Individual modules may require a more recent library version to support specific features or require the boto library. Check the amazon.aws Collection documentation for the minimum required version for each module. Continue reading

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VMware resource MOID lookup filter

Are you trying to manage private clouds easily and efficiently using Ansible Automation Platform? When it comes to VMware infrastructure automation, the latest release of the vmware.vmware_rest Collection and new lookup plugins bring a set of fresh features to build, manage and govern various VMware use cases and accelerate the process from development to production.

The modules in the vmware.vmware_rest Collection rely on the resource MOID a lot. This is a design decision that we covered in an earlier blog. Consequently, when the users want to modify a VMware resource, they need to first write Ansible tasks to identify its MOID.

The new 2.1.0 release of vmware.vmware_rest Collection comes with a series of filter plugins dedicated to gathering the resource MOID. In this blog post, we will help you to keep your VMware automation playbooks concise.

 

But first, What is a MOID?

Internally VMware vSphere manages resources in the form of objects. Every object has a type and an ID. What we are calling MOID stands for Managed Object ID. Using the vSphere UI obfuscates the MOID logic from users and presents the objects in a visible hierarchy, potentially at several different locations.

 

Continue reading