Install Ansible on AWS | Mastering Ansible 2025-26 | Pythoholic | Ansible | SRE

Hey everyone, before we dive into today's Ansible session, I have something exciting to share. I am launching a complete mastering Ansible for beginners course very soon and there's a link in the description to join my waiting list and you will get early access, exclusive discounts and be notified the moment it goes live. Plus I love your feedback on what do you want to see in the course. Now this is a big step. Let's install Ansible on our machines but before that you need to understand why do we install Ansible and where do we do it. As we already discussed how we are able to minimize the workload of our DevOps team by using playbooks in Ansible and they were able to install and deploy applications across multiple servers using the playbook. So to do this we need to have an Ansible master which obviously will be the working station of our DevOps team members and from which we'll try and control the servers where we need to perform the changes or install or deploy the application basically on our target machines and that is the biggest advantage of using Ansible that is because you don't have to install any agent on the target machines in order to make the changes in them. You can use SSH for Unix based machines and remote partial for Windows machines. So our testing environment will be setting up a master node and two or three target nodes so that we can simulate a real-time deployment scenario. But let's first understand this once again. So you know why we are doing this. First up we have our Ansible master. So this is like the command center where all the instruction come from. Now look at the other computers here. We call these are the target machines. They are the ones that Ansible will manage. Once Ansible is installed on the master we'll tell it to connect to each target. No need to install anything on them. Ansible will work its magic from the master to the targets and just like that we are set. Our master can now send out tasks and our target will follow them. It's teamwork at its best. So now let's go ahead and create some virtual machines and install Ansible and let's have some fun. Before that please make sure you have an AWS free tier account. I have given a link in the description on how you can create one for yourself so that you can make use of it for creating your own EC2 instances. In this demo I want to install Ansible on the master node and we are going to test a few commands and operations that we are going to perform on the managed nodes. And at the end of this demo we will have a fully functional Ansible control node that can manage multiple machines remotely and this setup will allow us to run automation commands seamlessly across our infrastructure. All right. Now that we have a clear plan let's move on to our hands-on demo where we will set up our environment step by step. When it comes to installing Ansible the first thing that I wanted you to do is go to the documentation Ansible community documentation and here you're going to see the install guide. So when you click on that you will see multiple options and for us I want to install it on Ubuntu. So I'll just click on install Ansible on Ubuntu. I'll just zoom in it a bit. I'll just zoom in a bit so that you can also see it properly. So let's copy this command sudo apt update and let's go to Atomius and this is my master node. So last time what I did I created the master node the node the managed nodes here and I have logged in to the master node. Now let's just paste sudo apt update and let's hit enter. Let's update our master node and go ahead and copy the second command. Okay it is done updating. What we are doing here is basically purely beginner and if you feel it is too slow or too fast just please add that to the comment section or the description here so that it helps me understand the pace and I can actually edit videos accordingly and I can improve or decrease the pace that I have and that will actually help others as well. So please put in your comments and help me with the feedback. Okay next up next we'll install the Ansible package itself and the important thing that you would always have in mind is that do we need to install Ansible on the managed nodes as well and that's the beauty of using Ansible because it is agentless. You don't need to install anything on the managed nodes. It'll try to connect to them and it'll try to manage them accordingly. Okay we are good here. Ansible is installed. So let's see if it is actually installed. For that I will just type Ansible version. Yes it has installed. So the first and foremost thing that you need to check is Ansible core. This is the core version and also it would have installed Python. So Python 3.2. Ginger for templating and with this what we are going to do is we are going to create an inventory file to manage our managed nodes and with that we don't even need to care about ssh add. So if you are trying to specify everything properly inside the inventory file you don't need to worry about adding those ssh keys again and again. But now what I will do is I'll just create a folder here or I'll just create an inventory file which will be and I'll add my managed node details here. Let's do that. I will be naming my group as web server and my node one will have Ansible host. Let's go back to the host and see what's the name of the private key. Yes I'll add it base Ansible underscore user. This will be the username and the Ansible ssh private key file which will help us connect to this instance. Make sure that you type it exactly like this and don't make any mistakes of caps and other things that we don't want to have a headache like that again ssh slash id underscore rsa and I'll change the name to node two. That's it. This is our inventory file and it's all under the group called web server. Windows ls. Okay I have the inventory file so this should help me connect to the managed nodes and if I execute any Ansible operations we should be able to do that on our managed nodes as well. And in order to run a simple ad hoc operation what we need to do is we have to just type Ansible provide the group name like web server that I had or I can just provide all as well that it executes for all so for me it will be web server hyphen I inventory file name and the module name that I want to use is pink. Okay I think we are good here let's run that operation once again because I think we were not able to perform that operation clearly but for now we are able to connect to our managed nodes from our master node using just a simple inventory file next what we are going to do is I am going to perform an operation called setup it's going to pull out information like cpu ip address os memory all these informations from these two instances all these information are related to that particular ubuntu instance let's see the uptime so here instead of what is executing modules you can also execute commands so like if I use module command hyphen m command and hyphen a that is the append message or append command and just type uptime see the uptime is 45 minutes two users and that's what it is showing us and in this session what we did is basically install ansible and we were able to create a inventory file added our configurations our inventory details into that and when inventory file and we also connected to them connected to them using the sh key and we also performed ad hoc operations on those managed nodes and I hope you got the point here and I am sure that you will enjoy practicing this as well and make sure that you tune in to the next session because that's going to be really important I'll meet you in the next one