Variable: register: ec2 is not properly parsed when used

Hello Guys,

This is the first time I write to the group, so please bare with me if I miss something or my English is bad.

I want to create ec2 instances and use the output of the ec2 module as input for other tasks, like the description in the documentation. Unfortunately, unlike the documentation I have a problem using the ec2 variable that I register. The documentation states that to get the instance ID I need to do ec2.instanses.id, but actually I had to dive deeper and manually set it to ec2.results[0].instances[0].id. This is very error prone because the underlaying json returned by the ec2 module constantly changes the location of ec2.results and/or instances.

Am I doing something wrong? I really want to use the simple format ec2.instances.id

Here is the current example

  • name: Provision NAT instance
    local_action:
    module: ec2
    region: “{{ region }}”
    key_name: “key-dev”
    instance_type: “{{ ec2_nat_type }}”
    image: “{{ ec2_nat_image }}”
    wait: yes
    group: “{{ rcrtx_env }}_sg_nat”
    instance_tags:
    Name: “{{ rcrtx_env }}_nat”
    env: “{{ rcrtx_env }}”
    component: “nat”
    vpc_subnet_id: “{{ item.id }}”
    source_dest_check: no
    monitoring: yes
    exact_count: 1
    count_tag:
    component: “nat”
    with_items: vpc.subnets
    when: item.resource_tags.Name == “{{ rcrtx_env }}_subnet_public_1a”
    register: ec2nat

  • name: Associate new EIP for the NAT instance
    tags: eip
    local_action:
    module: ec2_eip
    in_vpc: yes
    region: “{{ region }}”
    instance_id: “{{ ec2nat.results[0].instances[0].id }}”
    when: ec2nat.results[0].instances[0].id is defined