Compare CloudFormer tasks in Ansible

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1

Hello

I have a need and I am trying to find if there is a module in Ansible that could help me with it. The scenario and the need is:

  • We have AWS Infrastructure setup and Applications built and running in AWS.

  • We have three accounts for Dev, QA and PRD.

  • Now we are required to leverage automation tools to build our QA landscape from what is already built in the Dev landscape. In other words, we need to copy Dev resources to QA and parameterize QA Apps and Configuration.

  • CloudFormer (a tool in CloudFormation) very nicely generates a template of the existing infrastructure in the Dev landscape, outputs into a JSON template and enables you to build a cloudformation stack to build QA resources.

My question is - Is there a parallel module or tool in Ansible that could do a similar job, to build a new environment from an existing one ?

Appreciate your responses.

thanks
Sreekanth

2

There is: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cloudformation_module.html

3

Hello Dick

Thanks for your response. Looks like you are referring to CloudFormation, but what I was asking is about a tool within CloudFormation which helps you to generate a template capturing all the resources from your existing infrastructure in JSON format, it is CloudFormer.

Later this template can be used to create a CloudFormation stack and spin up a new environment, kind of a replica but with some tweaking to suit the target landscape.

To keep it simple, I just want to know if Ansible has the capability to capture an existing Dev environment and help us automate the deployment of a similar QA environment, with some parameter and configuration changes.

Appreciate your response.

thanks
Sreekanth

4

Hi Sreekanth
I don't understand - there is a tool called CloudFormer, and you want
something in Ansible that does the same thing?

Dick

5

Ok, here is my requirement:

  • We have a Dev environment in AWS (with VPC, subnets, EC2, S3, Applications, etc)

  • Now we need to deploy QA environment similar to Dev, but we do not want to rebuild all the infrastructure (with VPC, subnets, EC2, S3, Applications etc) manually in QA, instead we want to deploy the entire infrastructure with automation, Infrastructure as code.

We want to kind of replicate the Dev environment but with necessary changes in parameters, such as instance name, Application Server name, instance type, storage size etc.,

Can the above be accomplished with Ansible, if yes, how ?

Hope it is clear now.

thanks
Sreek