Overview of Project ☁️

Scenario

A growing SaaS company, CloudNova, is expanding its backend infrastructure to support multiple internal services. As the number of servers increases, the engineering team starts facing serious operational issues.

Today, their EC2-based backend servers are:

• Configured manually after launch
• Set up slightly differently by each engineer
• Difficult to keep consistent across environments
• Error-prone during updates and maintenance

As the company scales, this approach becomes unreliable and unmanageable. A small configuration mismatch can cause outages, security gaps, or deployment failures.

To solve this, the team decides to adopt configuration management using Ansible, ensuring that every server is configured the same way, every time, using code.

Your Role as the DevOps Engineer

Your role is to introduce automated configuration management into the company’s AWS environment.

You are responsible for:

• Provisioning EC2 infrastructure using Terraform
• Managing multiple servers from a single control node
• Applying configuration consistently using Ansible
• Deploying applications without manual SSH work
• Ensuring configurations can be safely re-run

This mirrors how DevOps engineers replace manual server setup with repeatable, scalable automation in real teams.

Our Solution

You will use Terraform and Ansible together to fully automate server setup and application deployment.

The solution includes:

• Terraform to provision AWS infrastructure
• Two EC2 instances acting as managed nodes
• Ansible inventory to define target servers
• Ansible playbooks to configure software and services
• Automated deployment of a web application using Ansible
• Safe re-runs using Ansible’s idempotent design

The focus of this project is on configuration management fundamentals, not advanced orchestration or CI/CD pipelines.

About the Project

In this hands-on project, you will learn how Ansible is used in real-world AWS environments to manage and configure servers at scale.

You will learn:

• How Ansible connects to EC2 instances using SSH
• How inventories define groups of servers
• How playbooks describe desired configuration state
• How modules install software and manage services
• Why idempotency is critical for production systems
• How Terraform and Ansible complement each other

By the end of this project, Ansible will feel practical and predictable, not fragile or confusing.

Steps To Be Performed 👩‍💻

We’ll complete the project in the following stages:

1. Prepare the local environment for Ansible.
2. Provision EC2 infrastructure using Terraform.
3. Understand Ansible core concepts (just enough).
4. Configure EC2 instances using Ansible playbooks.
5. Deploy a web application using Ansible.
6. Re-run playbooks to observe idempotency.

Each step focuses on why things work, not just how to run commands.

Services Used 🛠

• Terraform – Infrastructure as Code
• Amazon EC2 – Virtual servers
• Amazon VPC – Networking and security
• AWS Security Groups – Network access control
• Ansible – Configuration management
• AWS IAM – Authentication and permissions

Estimated Time & Cost ⚙️

• Estimated Time: 2.5 - 3.5 hours
• Cost: $0 - $2 (covered by AWS Free Tier/credits if cleaned up)

➡️ Architectural Diagram

Here is the architecture diagram for this project:

➡️ Final Result

At the end of this project, you’ll have:

• Multiple EC2 instances configured consistently using Ansible.
• A web application deployed without manual intervention.
• Hands-on experience with real configuration management workflows.

This project prepares you for real AWS DevOps roles where manual configuration is not an option.