Managing AWS Infrastructure with Ansible
In this post, I’m going to discuss some concepts behind managing your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure using Ansible. Ansible is a very popular tool for configuring operating system instances and software; using the concepts and examples provided in this post would allow you to expand your use of Ansible to include—when using AWS—the creation and deletion of the operating system instances themselves, as well as related infrastructure components (like security groups or other services).
Preface
Before I continue, I’d like to first discuss the “fit” of using Ansible for this particular purpose. Ansible doesn’t store the state of managed systems. Perhaps this is due to the agentless architecture; I don’t know. What that means in this particular use case is that you must take other steps to store information you’ll absolutely need like instance IDs, security group IDs, and the like because Ansible itself doesn’t. In my mind, this makes Ansible a less-than-ideal tool for this particular use case. That doesn’t mean Ansible isn’t a good tool; it just means that Ansible may not be the best tool for this particular purpose. (Think of it like this: Yes, you can sometimes unscrew something using a knife, but a screwdriver Continue reading
