Master the Infra Game: Provision a Multi-OS Ansible Setup with Terraform

Spin up an entire Ansible environment with dynamic inventory and multiple OS in one go!

1. Problem Statement

In modern cloud-native infrastructure, organizations are rapidly moving towards automation-driven operations to reduce manual overhead and increase consistency in deployments. Ansible has emerged as a go-to tool for configuration management and orchestration, while Terraform leads the way in infrastructure provisioning using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.

However, setting up an Ansible-based automation environment manually still presents significant challenges, especially in environments involving multiple operating systems such as Ubuntu and Amazon Linux. Each operating system may require different configurations, package managers, and user setups, making it error-prone and time-consuming to handle everything manually.

Additionally, when managing hybrid or multi-OS infrastructures, there’s a growing need for:

• Dynamic inventory generation

• Key-based secure communication between nodes

• Automated node provisioning based on specific OS types

• Seamless integration between Terraform and Ansible

The lack of a unified, repeatable, and scalable solution to automatically provision and configure such an environment becomes a bottleneck in DevOps workflows. Cloud engineers, learners, and teams often spend hours setting up a basic Ansible lab with master-slave configurations, SSH keys, inventories, and package installations—all of which could be automated.

The problem becomes even more complex when:

• The number of slaves needs to scale dynamically.

• Multiple OS types are required to mimic production scenarios.

• SSH key distribution must be handled securely across nodes.

• Manual misconfigurations lead to wasted effort, broken connectivity, or insecure deployments.

---

2. Objective of the Use Case

To address these challenges, the goal of this use case is to fully automate the provisioning of an Ansible lab environment using Terraform where:

• A dedicated Ansible master node is created.

• Multiple slave nodes are launched across Ubuntu and Amazon Linux OS.

• The master is automatically configured with Ansible installed.

• Public keys are injected into slaves to establish secure passwordless SSH.

• A dynamic Ansible inventory file is generated on the master.

• All setup is driven via Infrastructure as Code, making it reproducible, scalable, and reliable.

This solution not only solves the technical provisioning problem but also acts as a practical learning and demonstration environment for real-world DevOps skills.

---

3. What’s the Objective!!!