Managing a public cloud infrastructure

The management of public cloud infrastructures with Ansible is no more difficult than the management of OpenStack with it, as we covered earlier. In general, for any IaaService provider supported by Ansible, there is a three-step process to getting it working:

1. Establish the Ansible modules available to support the cloud provider.
2. Install any prerequisite software or libraries on the Ansible host.
3. Define the playbook and run it against the infrastructure provider.

There are dynamic inventory scripts readily available for most providers, too, and we have already demonstrated two in this book:

• ec2.py was discussed in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible.
• openstack_inventory.py was demonstrated earlier in this chapter.

Let's take a look at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and specifically, their EC2 offering. We can boot...