Blog

In our last article, we took a look at how marrying Ansible and AWS makes a great deal of sense for DevOps enterprises and discussed eight specific ways Ansible helps create greater efficiency and effectiveness for AWS deployments. Today we will dive into the recently refactored Ansible to discuss its newest features and how they can further help bolster your AWS efforts. In addition, Ansible likes to bill itself as “batteries included”. As a result, we will also review the new "batteries" or modules that are available with the release of Ansible 2.0.

 In our last blog post, we discussed how Ansible’s configuration management tools can benefit Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments – especially for DevOps focused organizations. Today we’d like to share how to realize those benefits with Ansible Playbooks.

Playbooks are Ansible’s configuration, deployment, and orchestration language. Keeping in line with Ansible’s focus on simplicity without sacrificing security and reliability, Playbooks purposefully have a minimum of syntax because they aren’t meant to be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business. And, while it is easy to quickly spin up hundreds or thousands of new servers in minutes with Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s much more difficult to ensure that those new machines are configured appropriately. Enter the marriage of configuration management tools and AWS.