Managing AWS Infrastructure as Code using Ansible, CloudFormation, and CodeBuild

When it comes to provisioning and configuring resources on the AWS cloud platform, there is a wide variety of services, tools, and workflows you could choose from. You could decide to exclusively use the cloud-based services provided by AWS, such as CodeBuild, CodePipeline, CodeStar, and OpsWorks. Alternatively, you could choose open-source software (OSS) for provisioning and configuring AWS resources, such as community editions of Jenkins, HashiCorp Terraform, Pulumi, Chef, and Puppet. You might also choose to use licensed products, such as Octopus Deploy, TeamCity, CloudBees Core, Travis CI Enterprise, and XebiaLabs XL Release. You might even decide to write your own custom tools or scripts in Python, Go, JavaScript, Bash, or other common languages.

The reality in most enterprises I have worked with, teams integrate a combination of AWS services, open-source software, custom scripts, and occasionally licensed products to construct complete, end-to-end, infrastructure as code-based workflows for provisioning and configuring AWS resources. Choices are most often based on team experience, vendor relationships, and an enterprise’s specific business use cases.

In the following post, we will explore one such set of easily-integrated tools for provisioning and configuring AWS resources. The tool-stack is comprised of Red Hat Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS CodeBuild, along with several complementary AWS technologies. Using these tools, we will provision a relatively simple AWS environment, then deploy, configure, and test a highly-available set of Apache HTTP Servers. The demonstration is similar to the one featured in a previous post, Getting Started with Red Hat Ansible for Google Cloud Platform.

Why Ansible?

With its simplicity, ease-of-use, broad compatibility with most major cloud, database, network, storage, and identity providers amongst other categories, Ansible has been a popular choice of Engineering teams for configuration-management since 2012. Given the wide variety of polyglot technologies used within modern Enterprises and…