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What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

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What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what's new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

Forward-looking Changes

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

New Python Support Policy

On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and botocore), will no longer support Python 3.6. To continue supporting Red Hat's customers with secure and maintainable tools, we will be aligning with these deprecations and we will deprecate support for Python versions less than 3.7 by this collection. However, support for Python versions less than 3.7 by this collection will be removed in release 7.0.0. Additionally, support for Python versions less than 3.8 is expected to be removed in a release after 2024-12-01 based on currently available schedules.

Removed Features

The following features have been removed from this collection release.

  • ec2_vpc_endpoint_info - Support for the query parameter has been removed. The amazon.aws.ec2_vpc_endpoint_info module now only queries for endpoints. Services can be queried using the amazon.aws.ec2_vpc_endpoint_service_info module.
  • s3_object - Support for creating and deleting S3 buckets using the amazon.aws.s3_object module has been removed. S3 buckets can be created and deleted using the amazon.aws.s3_bucket module.

Deprecated Features

This collection release also introduces some deprecations. For consistency between the collection and AWS documentation, the boto3_profile alias for the profile option has been deprecated. Please use profile instead.

The amazon.aws.s3_object and amazon.aws.s3_object_info modules have also undergone several deprecations.

  • Passing contemporarily dualstack and endpoint_url has been deprecated. The dualstack parameter is ignored when endpoint_url  is passed. Support will be removed in a release after 2024-12-01 .
  • Support for passing values of overwrite other than always, never, different or last has been deprecated. Boolean values should be replaced by the strings always or never. Support will be removed in a release after 2024-12-01.

Code quality and CI improvement

Part of the effort in this release was dedicated to improving the quality of the collection's code. We have adopted several linting and formatting tools that help enforce coding conventions and best practices, with all code following the same style and standards. The linting tools help detect and flag code that may not be optimal, such as unused variables or functions, unnecessary loops or conditions, detect security vulnerabilities, and other inefficiencies. Formatting tools help to automatically format and style the code to ensure consistency and readability. 

Overall, this code quality improvement initiative aims to lead to more reliable, efficient and maintainable software that provides a better user experience and ultimately benefits both developers and end users. In addition, several plugins have undergone refactoring (e.g., removing duplicate code, simplifying complex logic and using design patterns where appropriate) to make the code more efficient and maintainable. We have also extended the coverage of unit tests so the code behaves as expected.

This initiative does not stop here. We have also decided to move to GitHub actions for CI from Zuul. This decision helps us simplify the CI pipeline as it is natively integrated with GitHub and improves scalability, collaboration, workflow management and the efficiency of the development process.

Because improving code quality is a continuous process that requires ongoing effort and attention, this work is ongoing and will be reflected in future releases.

Renamings

As naming might be generally tedious, a misleading module or option's name may complicate the user experience.

We decided to rename the amazon.aws.aws_secret lookup plugin in this collection release. This decision is a follow up of the renaming initiative started in release 5.0.0 of this collection. Therefore, the amazon.aws.aws_secret module has been renamed to amazon.aws.secretsmanager_secret. 

We have also decided to rename the amazon.aws.aws_ssm lookup plugin to amazon.aws.ssm_parameter.

However, aws_secret and aws_ssm remain as aliases and they will be deprecated in the future. 

For consistency amongst our plugins and modules, we renamed the following options:

  • aws_profile renamed to profile (aws_profile remains as an alias)
  • aws_access_key renamed to access_key (aws_access_key remains as an alias)
  • aws_secret_key renamed to secret_key (aws_secret_key remains as an alias)
  • aws_security_token renamed to security_token (aws_security_token remains as an alias)

These changes should not have observable effect for users outside the module/plugin documentation.

New Modules

This release brings a number of new base supported modules that implement AWS Backup capabilities. 

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that enables you to centralize and automate the backup of data across AWS services and on-premises applications,  eliminating the need for custom scripts and manual processes. 

With AWS Backup, you can create backup policies that define backup schedules and retention periods for your AWS resources, including Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon EFS file systems, and Amazon EC2 instances. 

The following table highlights the functionalities covered by these new Red Hat supported modules:

  • backup_restore_job_info - Get detailed information about AWS Backup restore jobs initiated to restore a saved resource.
  • backup_vault - Manage AWS Backup vaults.
  • backup_vault_info - Get detailed information about an AWS Backup vault.
  • backup_plan - Manage AWS Backup plans.
  • backup_plan_info - Get detailed information about an AWS Backup Plan.
  • backup_selection - Manages AWS Backup selections.
  • backup_selection_info - Get detailed information about AWS Backup selections.
  • backup_tag - Manage tags on an  AWS backup plan, AWS backup vault, AWS recovery point.
  • backup_tag_info - List tags on AWS Backup resources.

Automate backups of your AWS resources with the new AWS Backup supported modules

In this example, I show you how to backup an RDS instance tagged backup: "daily". This example can be extended to all currently supported resource types (e.g., EC2, EFS, EBS, DynamoDB) which are tagged with backup: "daily". The following playbook shows the the steps necessary to achieve that:

- name: Automated backups of your AWS resources with AWS Backup
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false


  tasks:
  - name: Create a mariadb instance tagged with “backup”; “daily”
     amazon.aws.rds_instance:
       id: "demo-backup-rdsinstance"
       state: present
       engine: mariadb
       username: 'test'
       password: 'test12345678'
       db_instance_class: 'db.t3.micro'
       allocated_storage: 20
       deletion_protection: true
       tags:
         backup: "daily"
     register: result


   - name: Create an IAM Role that is needed for AWS Backup
     community.aws.iam_role:
       name: "backup-role"
       assume_role_policy_document: '{{ lookup("file", "backup-policy.json") }}'
       create_instance_profile: no
       description: "Ansible AWS Backup Role"
       managed_policy:
         - "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForBackup"
     register: iam_role


   - name: Create an AWS Backup vault for the plan to target
     # The AWS Backup vault is the data store for the backed up data.
     amazon.aws.backup_vault:
       backup_vault_name: "demo-backup-vault"


   - name: Get detailed information about the AWS Backup vault
     amazon.aws.backup_vault_info:
       backup_vault_names:
         - "demo-backup-vault"
     register: _info


   - name: Tag the AWS backup vault
     amazon.aws.backup_tag:
       resource: "{{ _info.backup_vaults.backup_vault_arn }}"
       tags:
           environment: test


   - name: Create an AWS Backup plan
     # A backup plan tells AWS Backup service to backup resources each day at 5 o’clock in the morning. In the backup rules we specify the AWS Backup vault to target for storing recovery points.
     amazon.aws.backup_plan:
       backup_plan_name: "demo-backup-plan"
       rules:
         - rule_name: daily
           target_backup_vault_name: "demo-backup-vault"
           schedule_expression: "cron(0 5 ? * * *)"
           start_window_minutes: 60
           completion_window_minutes: 1440
     register: backup_plan_create_result


   - name: Get detailed information about the AWS Backup plan
     amazon.aws.backup_plan_info:
       backup_plan_names:
         - "demo-backup-plan"
     register: backup_plan_info_result


   - name: Create an AWS Backup selection
     # AWS Backup selection supports tag-based resource selection. This means that resources that should be backed up by the AWS Backup plan needs to be tagged with “backup”: “daily” and they are then automatically backed up by AWS Backup.
     amazon.aws.backup_selection:
      selection_name: "demo-backup-selection"
      backup_plan_name: "demo-backup-plan"
      iam_role_arn: "{{ iam_role.iam_role.arn }}"
      list_of_tags:
         - condition_type: "STRINGEQUALS"
           condition_key: "backup"
           condition_value: "daily"
     register: backup_selection_create_result


   - name: Get detailed information about the AWS Backup selection
     amazon.aws.backup_selection_info:
       backup_plan_name: "demo-backup-plan"

Once this playbook has finished the execution, AWS Backup will start to create daily backups of the resources tagged with backup=daily. You can monitor the status of the backup service demo on the AWS console. If we go to Jobs, we see some backup jobs that have already been completed. A backup job is the result of an AWS Backup plan rule and resource selection. It will attempt to backup the selected resources, within the time window defined in the backup plan rule.

screenshot

If we're taking a look at the AWS Backup vault we created, you can see it contains the recovery points of the RDS instance. A recovery point is either a snapshot or a point-in-time recovery backup. The data inside a recovery point cannot be edited. Tags and retention period can be changed if the backup vault allows it. You can use the recovery point to restore data.

screenshot

An AWS Backup restore job is used to restore data from backups taken with AWS Backup service. This release does not include the module that enables you to create an AWS backup restore job, but we are planning to include this feature in the future. However, in this release, we have included the amazon.aws.backup_restore_job_info module to get information about the restore job.

- name: Get detailed information about the AWS Backup restore job
  amazon.aws.backup_restore_job_info:
    restore_job_id: "{{ restore_job_id }}"
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