packer-ansible-ec2

Automated image builds for AWS EC2

Overview

On occasion, it becomes necessary to prebuild custom golden images for utilization with AWS EC2. This project aims to ease the burden of creating these images via automation. Packer and Ansible are utilized together, with Packer employing the the EBS AMI builder. This builder constructs a golden AMI by first launching an EC2 instance from an initial source AMI, then provisioning and customizing that running instance via user-provided automation (Ansible in the case of this project), and finally shutting the instance down and creating a golden AMI from the quiesced instance storage. This is all done in the AWS account specified via credentials. The builder will create temporary keypairs, security group rules, etc. that provide temporary access to the instance while the image is being created/customized.

Requirements

• Linux or MacOS system, with git and python available
• AWS account with existing VPC and subnet within the VPC. The VPC subnet needs to be accessible by your local system, so a publicly accessible subnet at the least should be utilized. Temporary keypairs and security group rules will secure the communication stream.
• Packer from https://www.packer.io/downloads
• Ansible installed via the package manager of choice for the given OS/distribution or via python\pip module install (virtualenv/venv recommended)

Configuration

1. Clone this repo to local system
2. cd to the packer-ansible-ec2 directory and then git checkout the build branch of interest
3. Either edit packer-build.json directly or copy to new json file and edit new file
   modify the following variables:

• ami_name: "Name of AMI 1.0 {{isotime 2006-01-02-150405}}" (default AMI name will include time stamp of build launch)
• aws_region: EC2 region where temporary build instance will run, ie us-east-1
• vpc_id: VPC ID that exists in the region specified above
• subnet_id: Subnet ID that exists within above VPC
• red_hat_activation_key: Red Hat Activation key that contains valid subscriptions for products being installed e.g. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• red_hat_org_id: Red Hat organization ID for account that owns above activation key

EBS AMI Build

packer build -machine-readable packer-build.json | tee build_artifact-$(date +%Y-%m-%d.%H%M).txt