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1.0 - About AWS EC2 and Ansible Automation

Overview

  • Cloud deployments have many benefits, including:
  • Rapid scalability
  • Deployment of fault-tolerant and highly available solutions
  • To leverage these benefits, one can use tools like Terraform and Ansible to rapidly deploy and configure servers

  • Typically provisioning is left to Terraform and configuration is done via Ansible, but Ansible can do both.

  • Provisioning via Ansible ensures fast, repeatable, compliant, and automatic deployment of systems, and can make it easier to apply updates and improvements quickly.

  • By automating deployments, one can reduce errors when:

  • Deploying to different regions
  • deploying version upgrades

  • there is a long pause between deployments

  • Defining automation via ansible also reduced human error.

  • Ansible offers many modules to dynamically provision workloads. In the following notes, tasks covered include:

  • Preparing AWS EC2 account and credentials
  • Automatically provision VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) networking
  • Provisioning and deprovisioning cloud instances with Ansible
  • Finding and selecting AMI images
  • Dynamically adding EC2 instances to the Ansible inventory for further configuration and management tasks to be applied.