intro-to-terraform-and-ansible

A hands-on workshop to become familiar with Hashicorp Terraform to provision and configure infrastructure and Red Hat Ansible to configure systems and deploy applications.

Lessons

Terraform lessons

• Lesson-01 - Terraform basics
• Lesson-02 - Terraform variables, output, and data
• Lesson-03 - More Terraform variables, plans, workspaces, and security
• Lesson-04 - Building an Ansible sandbox

Ansible lessons

• Lesson-05 - Ansible basics
• Lesson-06 - Playbook basics
• Lesson-07 - Practical Ansible
• Lesson-08 - Full web application

Demo

• Demo-09 - Putting it all together

Reference documentation

• Terraform AWS provider
• Ansible built-in plugins

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this workshop, you will need the following:

• Terraform installed
• SSH client
• AWS account with adequate permissions
• AWS CLI installed and configured
• AWS EC2 key pair

Terraform

Install Terraform on your laptop and make sure it is on your path.

$ terraform --version
Terraform v1.5.0
on linux_amd64

SSH client

You should have an SSH client installed and be familiar with using it. PuTTY is an option for Windows, but most Windows users will be better served with the client that comes with Git Bash. Other OSes likely have the client already installed.

$ ssh -V
OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.7, OpenSSL 1.1.1f  31 Mar 2020

AWS account with adequate permissions

You'll need an AWS account. The AWS Free Tier is sufficient.

If you are not the root account holder, make sure you have sufficient permissions to create EC2 instances. The AWS Managed AmazonEC2FullAccess policy should be enough.

You will need an AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key available to you. Creating an access key specifically for this workshop might be a good idea.

AWS CLI installed and configured

You must install the AWS CLI and configure it to use the AWS Access Key ID and AWS Secret Access Key you created previously.

Use aws configure to set up the AWS CLI to use them.

Ensure the configuration is in place and you can access AWS via the CLI.

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [****************5W7F]:
AWS Secret Access Key [****************G9m9]:
Default region name [us-east-2]:
Default output format [json]:

$ aws sts get-caller-identity
{
    "UserId": "AIDA6J6IBOTSMECN2JXTM",
    "Account": "983430165732",
    "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::983430165732:user/gene.gotimer-terraform"
}

AWS EC2 key pair

Create an EC2 key pair and configure your SSH client to use it. Some clients (cough PuTTY cough) need the key converted for use, so pay attention to your SSH client documentation.

$ aws ec2 describe-key-pairs
{
    "KeyPairs": [
        {
            "KeyPairId": "key-0343183b6656b1f95",
            "KeyFingerprint": "c9:26:37:46:e7:43:a4:c5:e4:61:a0:d8:ac:7b:54:f0:3b:9f:8d:99",
            "KeyName": "gene-test-us-east-2",
            "KeyType": "rsa",
            "Tags": [],
            "CreateTime": "2023-03-08T20:34:04.339000+00:00"
        }
    ]
}

We will be copying the public and private keys on to AWS EC2 instances, so you might want to create a key pair just for this workshop and then delete it immediately after, just in case.