Ansible, AWS and Elasticsearch demo

Prerequisites

The following must be installed prior to using this demo:

• Vagrant - tested with v1.6.5
• Virtualbox - tested with v4.3.20-96996

Helpful configurations

There are a few very useful Vagrant plugins that might make your life a little easier:

• Landrush
• Vagrant-pristine

Configuration for the demo

Get an Ansible Tower License

Go to the Ansible website and grab a license. For the purposes of this demo, a 10-node license is sufficient and that level of license is free and won't expire!

Take the contents of your license (it's a JSON document) and save it to a file in the root of this repository named: .tower.license. This file will be pulled into Vagrant when Tower is set up to automatically apply the license file and bypass the warning labels related to retrieving and applying a license to Tower.

Get a set of AWS credentials and create a boto.cfg file

AWS Credentials are used for a handful of things in this demo:

• First, they're used in the CloudFormation generation process
  • Queries AWS to determine the AZ's available to deploy VPC Subnets to
  • Uploads a CloudFormation template to an S3 bucket (you'll need to supply a bucket for this)
• Next, It's used to deploy the CloudFormation template itself
  • Generates EC2 keys for this deployment so they can be used by Ansible
  • Deploys/launches the CloudFormation template that was generated
  • Note: this will deploy EC2 and other resources and may incur a cost to your account.
• Finally, It's used by Ansible Tower to generate a dynamic inventory

As a reminder, the boto.cfg format is:

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = AWS_ACCESS_KEY
aws_secret_access_key = AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Resources deployed via CloudFormation

You will also need AWS credentials to deploy a set of CloudFormation scripts which will create an Elasticsearch deployment:

• 1 S3 Bucket
• 1 public-facing ELB
• 1 private ELB
• 1 SQS Queue
• 1 VPC with 2 public (/24) and 2 private subnets (/20) containing:
  • 1 bastion host
  • 1 Autoscaling group for Elasticsearch (min: 3, max: 3, desired: 3)
  • 1 Autoscaling group for Logstash Indexers (min: 1, max: 4, desired: 1)
  • 1 Autoscaling group to host Kibana (min: 1, max: 1, desired: 1)
  • 1 Autoscaling group for the Scheduler instance (min: 1, max: 1, desired: 1)

Running this demo

To start Tower, run the following command from the root of this repository in a terminal:

vagrant up tower

To log into Tower

If you have the Landrush Vagrant plugin installed:

https://tower.vagrant.dev

Otherwise, you can use the IP address directly:

https://10.42.0.10

Credentials for logging in the first time are:

• username: admin
• password: password