Preparing Ansible to work with AWS

Ansible interacts with AWS APIs to manage various infrastructure components. Using APIs requires credentials and an IAM user with the right permissions would help us do this. We also need to set up some libraries that would be required to execute certain Ansible modules. So let us get started.

How to do it...

Ansible ships with scores of AWS modules. These Ansible modules use AWS Python SDK, called Boto, as dependency and interact with AWS.

1. Let us install Boto using Python pip to get started:

$ pip install boto

2. Along with Boto, we also need to have a user who has enough privileges to create and delete AWS resources. AWS has a predefined policy called AmazonEC2FullAccess which can be...