Mulitple EC2 Provisioning - Do All or Do One and Make AMI?

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1

I was wondering what is everyone’s experience with provisioning multiple EC2 instances with Ansible. I am contemplating between two methods.

Example I want to provision 10 instances. Should I

  • provisioning 10 EC2 instances, then set them up all 10 via Ansible at once. I know we can speed this up just by increasing the number of parallel job in the ansible playbook
  • OR provision 1 EC2 instance, then up that one master with Ansible. Then make an AMI copy of that EC2 instance, and then launch 9 more with that AMI instead.
2

Ultimately it depends how different they are from each other.

Each can be good approaches.

If you are wanting to build an image with Ansible, ec2_ami (Ansible’s module), Packer, or aminator could be useful options to look into.

A lot of folks have a base image and then will have ansible configure it the rest of the way and make sure configurations are up to date – though I always do like live configuration, because it seems useful to have the latest security updates and such.