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 IaaS provider supported by Ansible, there is a three-step process to getting it working:

1. Establish the Ansible collections, modules, and inventory plugins 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 plugins readily available for most providers too, and we have already demonstrated two in this book:

• amazon.aws.aws_ec2 was discussed in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible.
• openstack.cloud.openstack was demonstrated earlier in this chapter.

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