First Steps with Ansible

All of the posts on orchestration on here have been about Puppet on CentOS however last week I had need to script an AWS architecture and then launch instances built with Packer↗ into it.

After much swearing I managed to hack together a python script which used Boto↗ to create a launch configuration and register it with an auto-scaling group, I then used a second script which re-cycled instances behind the Elastic Load Balancer which were launched with the previous launch configuration.

I decided there must be a more elegant way of doing this so I looked at Puppet using it to manage AWS, there are some modules available but there was a lot of people discussing the various ways to configure a VPC using Puppet. Then I remember that learning the basics of Ansible↗ was on my list of things to do.

As Ansible is agent-less I needed to install it on my Mac, this is simple enough as you can use Brew↗  ….

… once install I used a CentOS 7 Vagrant box to work through a few tutorials↗  …

… like all first steps using a new orchestration tool I had installed & configured NTPD.

The syntax itself isn’t too different from Puppet so it was easy to get the gist of what was going on. Once I had gotten my head around the basics I started on creating a Playbook↗ which configures a VPC and launches an Elastic Load Balancer , here is the current work in progress …

Once I have everything working as expected I will post an update.