Creating tagged AWS EC2 resources (like Elastic IPs) with Ansible

This is a quick note, having stumbled over this one today.

Mostly these days, I’m used to using Terraform to create Elastic IP (EIP) items in AWS, and I can assign tags to them during creation. For various reasons in $Project I’m having to create my EIPs in Ansible.

To make this work, you can’t just create an EIP with tags (like you would in Terraform), instead what you need to do is to create the EIP and then tag it, like this:

  - name: Allocate a new elastic IP
    community.aws.ec2_eip:
      state: present
      in_vpc: true
      region: eu-west-1
    register: eip

  - name: Tag that resource
    amazon.aws.ec2_tag:
      region: eu-west-1
      resource: "{{ eip.allocation_id }}"
      state: present
      tags:
        Name: MyTag
    register: tag

Notice that we create a VPC associated EIP, and assign the allocation_id from the result of that module to the resource we want to tag.

How about if you’re trying to be a bit more complex?

Here I have a list of EIPs I want to create, and then I pass this into the ec2_eip module, like this:

- name: Create list of EIPs
  set_fact:
    region: eu-west-1
    eip_list:
    - demo-eip-1
    - demo-eip-2
    - demo-eip-3

  - name: Allocate new elastic IPs
    community.aws.ec2_eip:
      state: present
      in_vpc: true
      region: "{{ region }}"
    register: eip
    loop: "{{ eip_list | dict2items }}"
    loop_control:
      label: "{{ item.key }}"

  - name: Tag the EIPs
    amazon.aws.ec2_tag:
      region: "{{ item.invocation.module_args.region }}"
      resource: "{{ item.allocation_id }}"
      state: present
      tags:
        Name: "{{ item.item.key }}"
    register: tag
    loop: "{{ eip.results }}"
    loop_control:
      label: "{{ item.item.key }}"

So, in this instance we pass the list of EIP names we want to create as a list with the loop instruction. Now, at the point we create them, we don’t actually know what they’ll be called, but we’re naming them there because when we tag them, we get the “item” (from the loop) that was used to create the EIP. When we then tag the EIP, we can use some of the data that was returned from the ec2_eip module (region, EIP allocation ID and the name we used as the loop key). I’ve trimmed out the debug statements I created while writing this, but here’s what you get back from ec2_eip:

"eip": {
        "changed": true,
        "msg": "All items completed",
        "results": [
            {
                "allocation_id": "eipalloc-decafbaddeadbeef1",
                "ansible_loop_var": "item",
                "changed": true,
                "failed": false,
                "invocation": {
                    "module_args": {
                        "allow_reassociation": false,
                        "aws_access_key": null,
                        "aws_ca_bundle": null,
                        "aws_config": null,
                        "aws_secret_key": null,
                        "debug_botocore_endpoint_logs": false,
                        "device_id": null,
                        "ec2_url": null,
                        "in_vpc": true,
                        "private_ip_address": null,
                        "profile": null,
                        "public_ip": null,
                        "public_ipv4_pool": null,
                        "region": "eu-west-1",
                        "release_on_disassociation": false,
                        "reuse_existing_ip_allowed": false,
                        "security_token": null,
                        "state": "present",
                        "tag_name": null,
                        "tag_value": null,
                        "validate_certs": true,
                        "wait_timeout": null
                    }
                },
                "item": {
                    "key": "demo-eip-1",
                    "value": {}
                },
                "public_ip": "192.0.2.1"
            }
     ]
}

So, that’s what I’m doing next!

Featured image is “2009.01.17 – UNKNOWN, Unknown” by “Adrian Clark” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-ND license.