Ansible Dynamic Inventory for AWS EC2

Dynamic inventory is an ansible and AWS plugin SDK <Boto3> that makes an API call to AWS to get the instance information in the run time. It gives you the ec2 instance details dynamically to manage the AWS infrastructure.

Instead of having to push an agent to every new instance you launch via user-data, roll an agent into an AMI, or engage in similarly management-intensive deployments of your config management software, the Ansible framework allows administrators to run commands against Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as soon as they are available, all over SSH. This document intends to examine ways that your Amazon EC2 inventory can be managed with minimal effort, despite your constantly changing fleet of instances.

# Ansible Dynamic Inventory for AWS EC2

### Pre-requisites:

1. Ansible Server — Get [Click here] to install on RHEL 8 and [click here] to install on Amazon Linux

### Setup

# Optional Step to add ssh to all ec2 instances in on go ! or to setup ssh in ansible hosts [Click here]

To get help on dynamic inventory please follow [Ansible Official Document]

To get help on dynamic inventory please follow [AWS Official Document]

1. Download [ec2.py] and [ec2.ini] files

2. Create IAM Programmatic access user with EC2 full access on AWS console if you are using ec2 instance as your ansible server

IAM → users→ Add user

EC2 → Select-your-server → Actions →Security→Modify IAM role→ Add or Update IAM role

2. Export IAM user credentials on the Ansible server. if you are using your own machine as a server

Get an IAM role and get secret keys from an AWS account.

2. Install AWS CLI on your machine.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install awscli

2. Configure AWS CLI

aws configure

Enter your aws Access and secret Access keys

AWS Access Key ID [****************DQ7G]:

AWS Secret Access Key [****************W9mW]:

Default region name [us-east-1]:

bash

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=’1bc123'

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=’abc123'

3. install python-pip and boto3

## Install Python

sudo apt-get install python

## Install pip

sudo apt install python3-pip

## Install Python Boto3 using PIP

pip install boto3

pip3 — version

4. To export keys permanently make sure that you have installed pip and boto and add credentials ~/.boto file

5. add executing permissions to ec2.py script

chmod 755 ec2.py

6. test the script

./ec2.py — list

6. List out servers that are running on ap-south-1a AZ

ansible -i ec2.py ap-south-1a — list-hosts

6. How to Run playbook with tags

### Option 1

1. We can run an ansible-playbook for our sever with some specific tag by giving hosts name as a tag in our playbook

— -

- name: Aerospike Dynamic Inventory

hosts: tag_dev_view

gather_facts: no

# vars_files:

2. then we can run our playbook as

``` ansible-playbook -i ec2.py main.yml ```

in this as we are giving tags in playbook tag is the combination of

```tag_dev_view``` tag → tag dev → key view →value

### Option 2

1. In this we can give multiple tags to our ansible server to identify environment and name Because we could have the same name in multiple environments.

2. For this we can get our hosts to all AWS we don’t have any hosts as it’s dynamic inventory.

3. Now we will be providing tags in command while running the ansible-playbook

## to ping server with tag

ansible -i ec2.py — limit tag_App_backend:&tag_Environment_staging:&tag_Usage_clock_worker” -m ping all

## To run the playbook

ansible-playbook -i ec2.py — limit tag_App_backend:&tag_Environment_staging:&tag_Usage_clock_worker” main.yml

GitHub Repo With Code [Ansible Dynamic Inventory for AWS EC2]

## Authors

The module is maintained by [Professor Xplorer]

## License

Licensed. See [LICENSE]() for full details.