Ansible 2 of 9: Inventory/Ad-Hoc Configuration

1 of 12. Open AWS Cloud9

2 of 12. Setup folders and files

Create a folder ansible-tasks
The ansible-tasks folder will be placed inside your 'environment' folder
Inside of ansible-tasks folder, create a file called hosts
Insert the Private IPs of the Hosts (host01 and host02) inside of the hosts file

pwd ls mkdir ansible-tasks cd ansible-tasks touch hosts echo 172.31.89.75 > hosts echo 172.31.18.118 >> hosts

If you don't know the private IP of your instances, you can find it easily:

Note: This example depends upon tagging your instances with names beginning with 'host'

aws ec2 describe-instances \ --filters 'Name=tag:Name,Values=host*' \ --query 'Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,Tags[?Key==`Name`].Value|[0],State.Name,PrivateIpAddress]' \ --output text | column -t

3 of 12. Use the ping module to test connectivity.'

Note: You will get an error unless you specify the correct login information, to include SSH key. Notice that the Debian host fails, even if you specify the key file, because Debian uses a default user 'admin' instead of 'ec2-user' like the RedHat host.

For ease of use, move your key file to the ansible-tasks folder

cd ansible-tasks mv ../tcb-ansible-key.pem .

ansible -i hosts all -m ping

ansible -i hosts all -m ping -e "ansible_ssh_private_key_file=tcb-ansible-key.pem"

4 of 12. Update the "hosts" inventory file

We will add the user information for each host AND we will add the SSH key file information. (This way, we do not have to specify those parameters at runtime.)

Try the ping module afterwards. Note: you can try the username at runtime, but it will only be able to connect to hosts where that username is valid.

host01 ansible_host=172.31.89.75 ansible_user=admin host02 ansible_host=172.31.18.118 ansible_user=ec2-user [all:vars] ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/home/ec2-user/environment/ansible-tasks/tcb-ansible-key.pem ansible -i hosts all -m ping

5 of 12. Add a group for the webservers to the "hosts" inventory file.

Follow-up by using the ping module against the webservers group

[webservers] host01 ansible -i hosts webservers -m ping

6 of 12. Check your Ansible config.

Note: You don't have a config file yet.

ansible-config ansible --version

7 of 12. Let's create a sample ansible config file.

This file will be placed inside the ansible-tasks folder. Copy from the sample ansible config file at Github

ansible.cfg

8 of 12. Make the ping module the default module.

Follow-up by re-testing ansible against your inventory file 'hosts'. Do not specify the ping module.

module_name = ping ansible -i hosts all

9 of 12. Set the default inventory file as 'hosts'

Uncomment and set inventory to include the path to your 'hosts' file

Follow-up by re-testing. Do not specify the inventory file

inventory = /etc/ansible/hosts,/home/ec2-user/environment/ansible-tasks/hosts ansible all

10 of 12. Check the ansible-inventory

ansible-inventory --graph

11 of 12. Check ansible-config version

Try the --version switch.

ansible-config --version

12 of 12. Try the dump option.

Non-default changes will be highlighted.

ansible-config dump

References

Ansible Configuration Settings (Latest)

Ansible Configuration Settings (2.9)

ansible.cfg

describe-instances

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orphaned No More: Adopting AWS Lambda

Image
Background HumanGov is a Model Automated Multi-Tenant Architecture (MAMA) that is meant to be used by the 50 states for personnel tracking. Currently the architecture is fully automated on AWS. The architecture is not ready for go-live. All actions so far are for a proof-of-concept that is presented to the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for review. During the weekly team meeting, Ko (User Experience Lead) reports that his team has performed thousands of tests against the infrastructure, with moves, adds, and changes, and is not finding any issues in the application user interface. Woo (Infrastructure Lead) reports that there are hundreds of 'orphaned' files in the S3 bucket. (These files are considered 'orphaned' because they do not have corresponding records in the DynamoDB table.) Kim (Tech Lead) reports that there is not a trigger to delete the file from the bucket when a user is deleted from the DynamoDB database. Brady (Lawyer) reports that not deleting t...
Read more

Containing the Chaos! | A Three-Part Series Demonstrating the Usefulness of Containerization to HumanGov

Background HumanGov is a Model Automated Multi-Tenant Architecture (MAMA) that is meant to be used by the 50 states for personnel tracking. Currently the architecture requires Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that are maintained by the HumanGov systems administrators. The systems administrators handle all the patching, operations, etc. Due to states wanting their data separate from each other, each state gets a separate set of EC2 instances, which means that as the application scales from one state up to 50 states, the systems administrators will have to patch 50x as many EC2 instances. The system administrators report that they have begun to schedule more and more overtime to handle the maintenance windows for updating the EC2 instances. The lead developer remarked that it was taking longer and longer for new application deployments to get rolled out as the infrastructure grew and more states came on board. By the way, the development environment does not have standa...
Read more

Ansible is the Answer! | A Three-Part Series Demonstrating the Usefulness of Ansible to HumanGov

This is a three (3) part series that demonstrates how Ansible can be useful/leveraged for configuring your infrastructure. The background story here is that HumanGov is a multi-tenant cloud application that requires that each of the fifty (50) states has its own separate infrastructure. The HumanGov Infrastructure Engineers are trying to figure out how they can get it done, and they are considering using Ansible to help them deploy the application. Part 1 sets up the base infrastructure for the scenario. The HumanGov Infrastructure Engineers are accustomed to using Terraform to efficiently deploy infrastructure, but they are not very experienced with Ansible. Part 1 of 3: HumanGov: Ansible is the Answer! | Terraform | AWS Cloud9 | AWS IAM | AWS EC2 | AWS DynamoDB | AWS S3 Part 2 attempts to setup HumanGov via a MANUAL process. Part 2 goes through the steps to MANUALLY install Python, Nginx AND application files as well as MANUALLY configuring the firewall in Ubuntu. After g...
Read more