Chapter 14. Amazon EC2

Ansible has several features that make working with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds much easier. This chapter focuses on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) because it’s the most popular IaaS cloud and the one I know best. However, many of the concepts should transfer to other clouds supported by Ansible.

Ansible supports EC2 in two ways:

  • A dynamic inventory plugin for automatically populating your Ansible inventory instead of manually specifying your servers

  • Modules that perform actions on EC2 such as creating new servers

This chapter covers both the EC2 dynamic inventory plugin and the EC2 modules.

Note

As of this writing, Ansible has nearly one hundred modules that relate to EC2 as well as other features offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). We have space to cover only a few of them here, so we focus on the basics.

Get Ansible: Up and Running, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.