ansible-elasticsearch-ec2-example

Ansible playbook to spin up an Elasticsearch cluster on Amazon's EC2 platform

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##Setup

1. Create a new EC2 Security Group

• Amazon has a great walkthrough
• Port 9300 should only be open to rest of the security group (Elasticsearch Transport Layer)
• Port 9200 and/or Port 80 should be carefully restricted (Elasticsearch Command Layer)
• Port 22 should be open (SSH Access)

2. Create and download an EC2 keypair

• You can only download this once, and instances are locked to a key, be careful!

3. Install Ansible on your local machine

• Use your package manager or download directly from Ansible

Configure

1. Edit the Ansible playbook

deploy_elasticsearch.yml

• Insert your keypair name, instance type, security group, AMI image, and instance count

  keypair: EC2KEYPAIRNAME
  instance_type: t1.micro
  security_group: EC2SECURITYGROUPNAME
  image: AMINAME
  instance_count: 2

• I used ami-c30360aa (Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit), but other Ubuntu images should work.

2. Edit the Elasticsearch configuration file

elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml

• Insert your AWS access key and secret key, and add any additional settings

##Run

1. Export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY as variables to your shell

• Calling source on a shell script is great for this

   >\#!/bin/bash    
   >export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='AKIA123456781234567'  
   >export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='123abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv'    
  

2. Run Ansible

• Execute the following:

  ansible-playbook deploy_elasticsearch.yml -vv --private-key=/path/to/ec2/key

• Make sure the key has permissions for only the current user!

3. Relax

• Or test your cluster by executing

  curl http://EC2PUBLICIPOFANODE:9200/_cluster/health?pretty=true

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####Quick fixes

• If Ansible complains about the local host group not existing, you may need to add 127.0.0.1 under the [local] heading in your ansible hosts file.