Say Hello to Enterprise AWS Ansible Collection

April 21, 2020 - Words by Tadej Borovšak

April 21, 2020
Words by Tadej Borovšak

In the era of fast changes, it is next to impossible to keep the infrastructure running manually. Why? Because there are just too many different pieces that we must keep running in harmony. And no, waiting for evolution to give us an additional finger or two for hyper-speed keyboard bashing is not an option ;) Luckily, there is a better way of solving this problem: automation.

Introducing AWS Ansible Collection

For those of you who are already using Ansible for your automation needs, we have some great news. We just released our enterprise AWS Ansible Collection that you can use to boss around your AWS resources. Creating your virtual private clouds and filling them with steaming-hot virtual machines has never been this easy and robust.

Are you not using automation yet? We have you covered too. With our layer of abstraction, you can almost think about Ansible as an implementation detail. Keeping your focus on the big picture should ease your automation transformation.

“But why would I want to use your AWS Ansible Collection?” We are glad you asked.

Infrastructure as Code

There are probably a gazillion definitions floating on the internet of what infrastructure as code (IaC) is. They all tend to agree that the central point of IaC is the automation of deployments through machine-readable instructions. But there is one aspect that all definitions tend to neglect: the human factor.

Deployment instructions should be human and machine-readable.

Deployment instructions do not materialize from thin air. Yes, we are sure ;) System administrators write them. And the same system administrators maintain and update them. So deployment instructions must also be human-readable, easy to use, and hard to abuse. And for this, we need high-quality and expressive automation components. Without them, we might end up with a tangled mess that no one dares to touch.

Because we felt the pain of using subpart automation components many times in the past, we decided to do something about it.

AWS Ansible Collection advantages

There are two main benefits of using our AWS Ansible Collection. First, all our modules have readable and intuitive parameters that help end-users follow best practices when writing Ansible playbooks. We tried to make sure that even if you are not familiar with Ansible, you can still grasp the essence of the playbook at first glance.

Not convinced this is possible? Try reading the Ansible playbook below and see for yourself.

- hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Create VPC for steam engine
      ec2_vpc:
        name: steam-cloud
        cidr: 10.0.0.0/16
      register: vpc

    - name: Create steam engine
      ec2_instance:
        name: steam-engine
        type: t3.micro
        ami: ami-0b7937aeb16a7eb94
        vpc: "{{ vpc.object.id }}"

It feels a bit strange to understand the system administrator’s mumbo-jumbo, right? ;) What is even more fascinating is that Ansible also understands those instructions and can use them to either create a new deployment or ensure an existing one fulfills the requirements. Magic ;)

The second main benefit of our AWS Ansible Collection is enterprise support. There is a lot of Ansible content available on the web, but the vast majority of it only has community support. With our collections, you always have a helping hand one message or call away.