I thought the Ansible 1.0 development cycle was busy but 1.1 is crammed full of orchestration goodness. On Tuesday, 1.1 was released and you can read more about it here: http://blog.ansibleworks.com/2013/04/02/ansible-1-1-released/
For those working on AWS and Eucalyptus, 1.1 brings some nice module improvements as well as a new cloudformation and s3 module. It’s great to see the AWS-related modules becoming so popular so quickly. Here are some more details about the changes but you can find info in the changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/CHANGELOG.md
Security group ID support
It’s now possible to specify the security group by its ID. This is quite typically behaviour in EC2 and Eucalyptus will support this with the pending 3.3 release. The parameter is optional.
VPC subnet ID
VPC users can now specify a subnet ID associated with their instance.
Instance state wait timeout
In 1.0 there was no way to specify how long to wait for instances to move to the running state (from pending). This adds a wait timeout parameter which allows the user to specify how long to wait for the instances to move to running before failing. Useful to stop a playbook blocking for a longer than desired amount of time. Thanks to milan for this one 🙂
EC2 idempotency via client token
EC2 implements idempotency for run instance requests via a client token parameter. This client token should be a unique ASCII string, as detailed here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Run_Instance_Idempotency.html. It ensures that another request to launch instances with the same client token would result in an evaluation for idempotency of the request. Rob Parrott added this feature.
Additional response elements in EC2 returns
The EC2 module returns some response elements which are attributes of the instance(s) you may have launched. Harold Spencer added all of the attributes, so these can be accessed in plays for later use.
CloudFormation module
James Martin added a CloudFormation module which takes a JSON template to deploy a collection of resources in AWS.
S3 module
This basic S3 module allows a user to put an object into a bucket and then returns a download url. Useful for stashing particular system info into S3 for archive, or as a different way to transfer files between hosts and groups. This module aims to be idempotent with a state parameter.
EC2 EBS module (ec2_vol)
This isn’t in the changelog but is a new module for volume creation and attachment to instances. Useful for supplementing the EC2 module in provisioning tasks but very basic. It’s not idempotent (yet) and takes the instance ID, volume size, availability zone and device name as parameters.
A big thanks goes out to all the other contributors to the AWS modules who I’ve not explicitly mentioned.
Take that to the bank and cash it! 