What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.cloud 0.4.0

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Control Collection (amazon.cloud) has been updated with a powerful new suite of modules. We introduced the experimental cloud collection for Ansible back in May of 2022 and it has come a really long way.  With the launch of the AWS Cloud Control API, developers have a consistent method to manage supported services that are defined as part of their cloud infrastructure throughout their lifecycle, so there are fewer APIs to learn as developers add new services to their infrastructure. The 0.4.0 version of the amazon.cloud collection not only improves the user experience in automating AWS cloud features with Ansible, but also provides improved code quality and an enhanced CI process.

This blog explains what is new in amazon.cloud 0.4.0 that will help both the developers and the users.

Forward-Looking Changes

Migration of CI from Zuul to GitHub Actions

Continuous Integration testing and the release process have been moved from Zuul to GitHub Actions for this collection. The tests include code linters (which check style formatting), unit tests, integration tests, sanity tests, and other custom checks. Using GitHub Actions has helped us save a Continue reading

Streamline Your Ansible Module Development with Content Builder

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

Are you tired of manually creating Ansible modules for every new tool, cloud service, or appliance you need to manage? Look no further than the Ansible Content Builder. This powerful Python tool can generate Ansible modules for any appliance or service with a network CLI, NETCONF, or OpenAPI. In this blog post, we'll show you how to use the Content Builder to scaffold your Ansible modules to create good, consistent content for your cloud platform of choice. We'll also explore how the Content Builder can help you onboard new tools and services into the Ansible ecosystem with ease. So if you're looking to supercharge your Ansible workflow and automate any cloud platform, this post is for you!

The Ansible Content Collections for hybrid cloud automation house multiple modules. These modules handle the creation, deletion, modification (and more) of cloud resources. While developing individual modules for different resources of the cloud platform can lead to modularity and ease of use, reinventing the wheel can be error-prone and time-consuming. Standardizing the common steps that are similar but differ based on limited parameters can solve many problems encountered while developing these modules. This is achieved Continue reading

Let Ansible keep an eye on your AWS environment

In a cloud model, the security of the environment and compliance becomes the responsibility of both the end users and the cloud provider. This is what we call the shared responsibility model in which every part of the cloud, including the hardware, data, configurations, access rights, and operating system, are protected. Depending on the local legislation and the origin of the data that is handled (for instance laws like HIPAA, the GDPR in Europe, or the Californian CCPA),  you may have to enforce strict rules on your environment and log events for audit purposes. AWS CloudTrail will help you to achieve this goal. The service can collect and record any kind of information coming from your environment and store or send the events to a destination for audit. In addition to security and compliance, this service helps keep track of resource consumption.

Ansible’s CloudTrail module is used to leverage the various features of the CloudTrail service to monitor and audit user activities and API calls in the AWS environment. A trail is a configuration that lets us describe an event filter and decide where the matching entries should be sent. The recent 5.0.0 release of the Amazon.aws Continue reading