Creating infrastructure with Ansible

September 3rd, 2022

Let's start at the beginning.

If we want to automate our infrastructure then we first need to create it. This could be done manually or we can automate it.

Popular tools for this include Terraform and Pulumi, but Ansible also includes modules to interface with hosting providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, and Linode.

By using one of these tools, you can programatically provision a new, blank server that is ready for you to be configered.

For example, to create a DigitalOcean droplet:

---
- community.digitalocean.digital_ocean_droplet:
    image: ubuntu-20-04-x64
    name: mydroplet
    oauth_token: "..."
    region: sfo3
    size: s-1vcpu-1gb
    ssh_keys: [ .... ]
    state: present
    wait_timeout: 500
  register: my_droplet

Running this playbook will create a new Droplet with the specified name, size, and operating system, and within the specified region.

If you needed to create a separate database server or another server for a new environment, then the file can be updated and re-run.

Creating an Amazon EC2 instance looks very similar:

---
- amazon.aws.ec2_instance:
    image_id: ami-123456
    instance_type: c5.large
    key_name: "prod-ssh-key"
    name: "public-compute-instance"
    network:
      assign_public_ip: true
    security_group: default
    vpc_subnet_id: subnet-5ca1ab1e

This doesn't apply just to servers - you can also use Ansible to create security groups and S3 buckets, manage SSH keys, firewalls, and load balancers.

Once we have our infrastructure in place, we can start using Ansible to set and manage its configuration, which we'll do in tomorrow's email.

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Want to learn more about how I use Ansible? Register for my upcoming free email course.

- Oliver