Amazon AWS

Install Ansible 2.0+ on Amazon AMI

Today, while upgrading some of my Ansible roles I’ve hit the problem. Some of the newer roles require Ansible 2.0. My Amazon AMI machine that runs the playbooks was still on version 1.9. EPEL repository doesn’t seem to have the newer Ansible version yet. Gladly, Google brough in this StackOverflow thread, which suggested installing Ansible with pip, not with yum. This helped a lot:

rpm -e ansible
pip install ansible

It actually brought in Ansible v2.2 (see also Ansible v2.1), which is even better.

Easier AWS CLI with Docker

Here is a handy blog post that shows how to simplify the installation and running of the Amazon AWS command line commands, using Docker. With the Dockerfile like this:

FROM python:2.7
ENV AWS_DEFAULT_REGION='[your region]'
ENV AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='[your access key id]'
ENV AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='[your secret]'
RUN pip install awscli
CMD /bin/bash

One can build the image and run the container as follows:

$ docker build -t gnschenker/awscli
$ docker push gnschenker/awscli:latest
$ docker run -it --rm -e AWS_DEFAULT_REGION='[your region]' -e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='[your access ID]' -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='[your access key]' gnschenker/awscli:latest

Obviously, DO NOT hardcode your Amazon AWS credentials into an image, which will be publicly available through DockerHub.

Once the AWS CLI works for you, you can add the command to your bash aliases, to make things even easier.

Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09

AWS Blog lets us know that Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 is now available. It comes with a variety of updates, such as Nginx 1.10, PHP 7, and PostgreSQL 9.5 and Python 3.5. Another thing that got quite a bit of improvement is the boot time of the Amazon Linux AMI instances. Here’s a comparison chart:

Read about all the changes in the release notes.

P.S.: I’m still stuck with Amazon AMI on a few of my instances, but in general I have to remind all of you to NOT use the Amazon AMI. You’ve been warned.

“AWS Week in Review” goes open

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon AWS for over two years now. One thing that absolutely blows me away is how much activity there is in Amazon AWS development. Every day there is an announcement of a new services or updates to the existing ones. In order to help people keep up with all the updates, Jeff Barr of Amazon was blogging “AWS Week in Review” for a few years.

Now, imagine this – there is so much new stuff going on that it takes hours to prepare each of those blog posts:

Unfortunately, finding, saving, and filtering links, and then generating these posts grew to take a substantial amount of time. I reluctantly stopped writing new posts early this year after spending about 4 hours on the post for the week of April 25^th.

This is insane! So he almost gave up on the idea, as it is too time consuming. But people want it. What’s the solution? Go Open Source!

The AWS Week in Review is now a GitHub project (https://github.com/aws/aws-week-in-review). I am inviting contributors (AWS fans, users, bloggers, and partners) to contribute.

Every Monday morning I will review and accept pull requests for the previous week, aiming to publish the Week in Review by 10 AM PT. In order to keep the posts focused and highly valuable, I will approve pull requests only if they meet our guidelines for style and content.

At that time I will also create a file for the week to come, so that you can populate it as you discover new and relevant content.

I think that’s a brilliant move. Those weekly review posts are super useful for anyone involved with Amazon AWS. They should keep coming. But the time cost involved is understandable. So crowd-sourcing this is a smart way to go about it.

I hope this will not only continue the blog post series, but also take it to the new level, with more section, content, and insight.

Well done!