Prepare Base Environment

Setup your LearnFest Base Environment

You’ll run the LearnFest tasks on RHEL instances on AWS. So before starting with AAP you have to stand up the needed instances.

The guide has been tested using a blank AWS environment sandbox Red Hatters can order in RHPDS. But everything should work the same in a regular AWS account with access tho the RHEL 8 marketplace AMIs.

Deploy RHEL Instances into AWS Account

So off to the first tasks: deploy the needed RHEL instances into an AWS account. And as a warm-up you’ll use Ansible for this (we have prepared the Playbook for you). If this your first encounter with Execution Environments and ansible-navigator; just enjoy, you’ll learn more about all this later.

Prerequisites

  • A PC or VM prepared to run ansible-navigator and podman
  • Make sure you have access to an AWS account, Red Hatters please deploy Service “AWS Blank Open Environment” from RHPDS
  • Make sure you have a valid Access Key ID and a Secret Access Key for your AWS account, Red Hatters will find this in the confirmation email from RHPDS

Tasks

  • On your ansible-navigator machine: Clone https://github.com/ansible-learnfest/playbooks-infra.git and change into the new directory.
  • Follow the instructions in the repo’s README.md file to deploy the LearnFest base environment instances
    • Update the number of instances in group_vars/all/main.yml to 5 (instance_total:)
    • Change the name prefix (instance_name:) of the instances if you want
    • The Playbook will use the SSH key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub by default, if this key doesn’t exist or you want to use another key, change ec2_key_pair:
    • run the playbook with ansible-navigator run cloud-infra.yml

How did ansible-navigator know which execution environment to use? Have a look at the ansible-navigator.yml config file…

Goals

  • 5 x t3.large instances deployed in a new AWS VPC
  • Look up the Public IPv4 DNS FQDN of your instances in the AWS Console.
  • Being able to login via SSH into the instances using the FQDN’s and to become root
    • Example: ssh -i "~/.ssh/id_rsa" ec2-user@ec2-3-72-65-199.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com

Tips

  • Podman login for pulling the execution environment image is your quay.io credentials with encrypted password, not the RH Customer Portal credentials.
  • Using the Ansible content from our repo you can tear down all instances and the VPC and start over: ansible-navigator run cloud-infra.yml -e remove=true