Reusing existing EC2-Classic targeted Playbooks for EC2-VPC

[Sankalp Khare]

Hi,

Over the past few months using Ansible, I've accumulated a handy bunch of playbooks which create different varieties of servers. The top-level directory looks like this :

modular-role-based-playbooks

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-bare-micro-instance-amazon.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-captcha-server.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-sandbox-server.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-support.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-test-machine-for-interview.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-web.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-webdriver.yml

|-- [-rw-r--r--]  create-worker.yml

|-- [drwxr-xr-x]  envs

|-- [drwxr-xr-x]  group_vars

|-- [lrwxr-xr-x]  inventories -> ../inventories

|-- [drwxr-xr-x]  make-playbook-with-roles

|-- [drwxr-xr-x]  roles

`-- [drwxr-xr-x]  templates

How must I proceed so that with minimum redundancy I can create the same types of servers inside VPC as well?

I understand that the ec2 module requires extra parameters passed when the instance is to be created inside VPC, so is it possible to have a conditional that disables/enables these parameters?

Any help would be appreciated.

--

Sankalp

[Will Thames]

For your setup, I'd recommend either having a role to create an instance, or a single playbook that creates an instance and later kicks off ansible-pull. You really shouldn't have to be changing your use of the ec2 module across multiple files.

I would just choose values for the required variables so that they work in either environment.

Let's say you have a group for VPC hosts (you might have multiple groups for multiple VPCs) - and one for non VPC hosts

Then in the vpc1.yml, set things like vpc_subnet_id (looking at the docs that's the only one you'll likely need)
In nonvpc.yml, have vpc_subnet_id: ""

And then when you use the ec2 module, pass
vpc_subnet_id: "{{vpc_subnet_id}}"

Will