I use AWS infrastructure as a service (IaaS) heavily, both personally and professionally. I have a slew of all different types of instances, doing different types of things. In many cases, I’ll want backups; basically, AWS snapshots. I needed a way to quickly create and manage backups through the use of AWS snapshots in an automated fashion. Sounds like a job for Ansible - and that’s exactly what I did. I wrote a playbook to handle all of this management.

Automating the creation and updating of AWS AMI images uses Ansible. the problem One of the first problems when deploying anything is managing the base image. The gold load. The template. The thing that all systems are created from. Since we’re operating in AWS, our story begins with AMIs. We use AMIs. From those AMIs, instances are built and configured. We want to optimize this configuration process, so it makes sense to pre-configure our AMIs as much as possible.