Leveraging Ansible to automate AWS instance management

Ansible is an open-source software automation tool suited for instance configuration and provisioning, enabling an Infrastructure as Code approach to the Cloud. In this page we provide a set of ansible-playbooks templates to perform the most common task to tune EC2 instance types with Akamas, such as:

  • EC2 instance creation

  • EC2 instance termination

  • EC2 instance resizing

Refer to the Ansible documentation and to the Ansible ec2 module for more details, and make sure to check the concepts behind inventory management to build a robust automation.

The orchestrator requires access to an account or role linked to the correct policies; this requires managing AWS Policies and having access to the required security groups.

Instance Creation

The following example playbook provisions an EC2 instance using the latest Ubuntu 18-04 LTS image and then waits for it to be available. The playbook requires the following set of arguments:

  • key: the name of the SSH key pair to use

  • Name: the instance name

  • security_group: the name of the AWS security group

  • region: the selected AWS region

You can update the ec2_ami_info task to query for a different AMI family or specify directly the id under ec2.image.

When executing the script we must assign the following arguments as extra-vars:

  • intance_type: type of instance to provision

  • volume_size: size of the attached volume

# Launch an ubuntu instance and wait for ssh

- name: Create an instance request
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False

  tasks:
    - name: query api
      ec2_ami_info:
        filters:
          name: "ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-bionic-18.04-amd64-server-*"
          owner-id: "099720109477"  # Canonical Group Limited
      register: amis
    - name: sort by creation date
      set_fact:
        sorted_amis: "{{ amis.images | sort(attribute='creation_date') }}"
    - name: get latest
      set_fact:
        latest_ami: "{{ sorted_amis | last }}"

    - name: Launch instance
      ec2:
         key_name: "{{ key }}"
         instance_type: "{{ instance_type | default('m5.xlarge') }}"
         group:
          - <your-security-groups>
         image: "{{ latest_ami.image_id }}"
         count: "{{ count | default('1') }}"
         wait: yes
         wait_timeout: 500
         region: "{{ region }}"
         spot_wait_timeout: 600
         instance_initiated_shutdown_behavior: terminate
         ebs_optimized: yes
         volumes:
           - device_name: /dev/sda1
             volume_type: gp2
             volume_size: "{{ volume_size | default('20') }}"
             delete_on_termination: yes
         instance_tags:
           Name: "{{ Name }}"
           CNAME: "{{ Name }}.<your-domain>"
      register: ec2

    - name: Wait for SSH to come up
      wait_for:
        host: "{{ item.public_dns_name }}"
        port: 22
        delay: 60
        timeout: 320
        state: started
      with_items: "{{ ec2.instances }}"

To apply the EC2 parameters from the AWS Optimization Pack selected by the Akamas engine you can generate the playbook arguments through a template like the following one, where ec2 is the name of the component:

ansible-playbook -i inventory --extra-vars "instance_type=${ec2.aws_ec2_instance_type}.${ec2.aws_ec2_instance_size}" provision.yaml

Instance Termination

The following playbook terminates all instances with the specified name (or any other tag). It requires the following arguments:

  • instance_name: the name instances name

  • region: the selected AWS region

# Terminate an aws instance

- name: Terminate instance
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: False
  tasks:
  - name: retrieve instance info
    ec2_instance_info:
      filters:
        "tag:Name": "{{ instance_name }}"
    register: ec2

  - name: terminate the instance
    ec2:
      state: absent
      instance_ids:
        - "{{ item.instance_id }}"
      region: "{{ region }}"
    with_items: "{{ ec2.instances }}"

Instance Resizing

Instance resizing is a little trickier to deploy as it requires you to install AWS CLI and setup the required credentials. The following playbook provides a simple way to stop, update and restart your instance: it is intended as a building block for more elaborate workflows.

It makes use of a list of arguments:

  • instance_name: your instance name

  • region: the selected AWS region

For a successful workflow it requires:

  • The instance to exist

  • The instance to be unique

# Change instance type, requires AWS CLI

- name: Resize the instance
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no
  connection: local
  tasks:
  - name: save instance info
    ec2_instance_info:
      filters:
        "tag:Name": "{{ instance_name }}"
    register: ec2
  - name: stop the instance
    ec2:
      region: "{{ region | default('us-east-2') }}"
      state: stopped
      instance_ids:
        - "{{ ec2.instances[0].instance_id }}"
      instance_type: "{{ ec2.instances[0].instance_type }}"
      wait: True
  - name: Change the instances ec2 type
    shell: >
       aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute --instance-id "{{ ec2.instances[0].instance_id }}"
       --instance-type "{{ new_instance_type }}"
    delegate_to: localhost
  - name: restart the instance
    ec2:
      region: "{{ region }}"
      state: running
      instance_ids:
        - "{{ ec2.instances[0].instance_id }}"
      wait: True
    register: ec2
  - name: wait for SSH to come up
    wait_for:
      host: "{{ item.public_dns_name }}"
      port: 22
      delay: 60
      timeout: 500
      state: started
    with_items: "{{ ec2.instances }}"

To apply the EC2 parameters from the AWS Optimization Pack selected by the Akamas engine you can generate the playbook arguments through a template like the following, where ec2 is the name of the component:

ansible-playbook -i inventory --extra-vars "new_instance_type=${ec2.aws_ec2_instance_type}.${ec2.aws_ec2_instance_size}" resize.yaml

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