Ansible AWS SSM enables us to manage and automate AWS resources. Bobcares, as a part of our AWS Support Services offers solutions to every query that comes our way.

What Is Ansible AWS SSM?

We can manage and automate AWS resources with AWS Systems Manager because of the Ansible feature called Ansible AWS SSM. Using a variety of APIs and tools, AWS SSM offers a consolidated and integrated interface for managing AWS resources, including EC2 instances.

We can start EC2 instances, manage security groups, set up IAM roles, and remotely execute commands on EC2 instances, among other tasks, using AWS resources using Ansible AWS SSM. It also enables us to effectively manage AWS resources by using the declarative language and automation features of Ansible.

Incorporating with AWS SSM

Consider we need to set up a group of Apache web servers to provide the same web content. To distinguish them, each of them has a resource tag with the key “role” and the value “webserver”. We want to establish a procedure that constantly checks to see if these instances are configured correctly.

Let’s review an example of how to streamline processes using the new Ansible SSM document.

1. Firstly, we must open the AWS Management Console and sign in.

2. Then go to State Manager.

3. Press the Association button.

4. Give the association a name if you want to. It’s referred to as a web server.

5. From the list of SSM documents, pick AWS-ApplyAnsiblePlaybooks.

6. Select S3 in the source type field.

7. Enter the path to the zip file in Amazon S3 location in the source info field. Enter the file location in the following format using JSON notation. For instance: {“path”:”https://example-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/automation.zip”}

8. Select true in the install dependencies field. This installs Ansible for us along with all of its requirements.

9. We must include the complete relative path to the main playbook’s location in the playbook file. Since the primary file is called server.yml and we compressed the files into a folder called automation. In this area, we enter “automation/server.yml”.

10. We can enter a second variable to be used during execution in the extra variable field.

11. We choose the specify tags option under the targets section. then type in our web server’s tag definition. That is tag value: webserver and tag key: role. All instances that contain a tag with the key role and value webserver are the ones that the Systems Manager State Manager will execute on.

12. Set the frequency at which we want to run this association on the specified schedule.

13. Lastly, click Create Association.

These steps help us to integrate Ansible – AWS SSM easily.

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Conclusion

The article provides a 13-step method from our Tech team to incorporate Ansible AWS SSM.