🙏 Introduction:

In this blog, we'll explore Ansible, an open-source automation tool that's important for managing configurations, deploying apps, organizing intra-service tasks, and helping with provisioning.

🔶What's this Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.

🎯Task: 1

1. Installation of Ansible on AWS EC2 (Master Node)

• Create an EC2 instance

• Add the Ansible PPA repository using the following command

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible

• Now update the Package manager

sudo apt update

• Install Ansible using the following command

sudo apt install ansible

• To check the version of Ansible using the following command

ansible --version

🎯Task: 2

1. Read more about Hosts file sudo nano /etc/ansible/hosts ansible-inventory --list -y

Ansible hosts file is a configuration file that contains a list of hosts or servers that Ansible can manage. The hosts file is located at /etc/ansible/hosts on the Ansible control node, and it is used to define the inventory of hosts that Ansible can manage.

To edit the hosts file

sudo vim /etc/ansible/hosts

Once the file is open, you can add the IP addresses or hostnames of the servers you want to manage. The format for adding hosts is as follows

[web_servers]
web1 ansible_host=192.168.1.101
web2 ansible_host=192.168.1.102

[database_servers]
db1 ansible_host=192.168.1.201
db2 ansible_host=192.168.1.202

In this example, we have two groups: web_servers and database_servers, each containing two hosts. You can define various attributes for each host, such as ansible_host (IP address or hostname) and others.

After adding the hosts to the file, you can verify the inventory of hosts that Ansible can manage using the ansible-inventory command.

ansible-inventory --list -y

This command displays a YAML-formatted list of hosts and their attributes, including hostnames, IP addresses, and any other defined variables or group memberships

🎯Task: 3

1. Setup 2 more EC2 instances with same Private keys as the previous instance (Node)

• Launch 2 new EC2 instances with same private keys as Ansible-master-node instance

1. Copy the private key to master server where Ansible is setup

• Create a directory on the master node named as keys and get the path of the keys directory

• From our local machine, transfer the private key to the master node..

scp -i "ansible-key.pem" ansible-key.pem ubuntu@ec2-34-216-70-154.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/ubuntu/keys

1. Try a ping command using ansible to the Nodes

• Configure the host file on master machine

sudo vim /etc/ansible/hosts

• Add our slave’s Ip address here

[servers]
host_1 ansible_host=54.184.85.99 
host_2 ansible_host=54.200.206.23

[all:vars]
ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python3
ansible_user=ubuntu
ansible_ssh_private_key_file=/home/ubuntu/keys/ansible-key.pem

• To verify the inventory of hosts

ansible-inventory --list

• Change the private key permission

• To check the nodes are connected

ansible -m ping all