"How do I spin up multiple ec2 instances, all with differing tags?"

This question is one of the many insightful questions asked by attendees during AnsibleFest 2015 San Francisco at our "Ask an Expert" tables. AnsibleFest was a great opportunity for the Ansible team to engage with customers of both Ansible and Tower and to understand their use cases, frustration, and love when working with our products.

The "Ask an Expert" program allowed attendees to sign-up for 15 minute slots to talk with more than 15 Ansible experts, resulting in over 50 customer questions! 

Feedback from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive. I can say that the feeling is mutual from the Ansible team side! It was a joy to hear from so many users of Ansible and Tower.

Example AnsibleFest "Ask an Expert" sign-up sheet:

Onto the Playbook

Now that we have the back story out of the way, let's get into the playbooks. Several attendees asked how to spin up multiple ec2 instances, all with differing tags.

Extrapolating from that question the user wants/concerns are:

• The ec2 doesn't "count" (spins up multiple identical instances)
• Run tasks/plays against spun up instances (obviously)
• Assign different properties to each instance (i.e. tags)

From the above requirements I will demonstrate a general design that can be applied to (1) other cloud modules host bring ups with (2) associated per-host attributes (i.e. tags, security groups, etc).

Note: Ensure that environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY are set and that you have the Boto python library installed.

Playbook time!
https://github.com/chrismeyersfsu/playbook-ec2_properties

├── README.md
├── inherit.yml    <-- showcase add_host
├── inv_trick.yml  <-- using dummy inventory entries
├── inventory      <-- [ec2_instances] dummy group to be filled in with ec2 instances
└── new_group.yml  <-- express ec2 instances and tags w/ variables

ansible-playbook -i inventory inherit.yml

inherit.yml is equivalent to a "hello world" for this design. You can play around with hostvars and add_host without the time consuming part of spinning up ec2 instances and without the side effect of creating too many instances in ec2. It uses the special Ansible variable play_hosts to execute the add_host task for each play in the playbook and accesses variables associated with the play, defined in the inventory file.

Now let's throw ec2 in the mix.

ansible-playbook -i inventory inv_trick.yml
ansible-playbook -i inventory new_group.yml

Both inv_trick.yml and new_group.yml accomplish the same thing using different designs.

new_group.yml defines an array of dictionaries that is looped over to start ec2 instances. The dictionary entries contain attributes that are "forwarded" to the ec2 module.

inv_trick.yml uses host variables from the ec2_instances group defined in the inventory file and "forwards" them to the ec2 module.

Both designs create a dynamic_group in the playbook from the ec2 results. The final play in the playbook then runs the ping task to demonstrate that tasks can be performed on the newly created dynamic_group.