Getting Ansible ready for targeting AWS

We first need to discuss how to pass our access key ID and secret access key to Ansible safely and securely. As I will share the final playbooks in a public repository on GitHub, I want to keep my AWS keys private from the world as that could get expensive! Typically, if it were a private repository, I would use Ansible Vault or some other secret management to encrypt the keys and include them with other potentially sensitive data, such as deployment keys.

In this case, I don’t want to include any encrypted information in the repository, as it would mean that people would need to unencrypt it, edit the values, and then re-encrypt it. Luckily, the AWS modules allow you to set two environment variables on your Ansible controller; those variables will then be read as part of the playbook execution.

To set the variables, run the following commands to make sure that you replace the content with your access key and secret after = (the...