Launching an instance using Ansible doesn't provide a user much beyond consistency, in that a playbook describes the end state of the environment: every time a user runs the task, it will either need to launch that specific instance to ensure that it is present, or it will skip that task because the instance is already running. However, we can achieve a lot more with Ansible beyond just launching a virtual machine. In this recipe, we will launch another instance that will install and start Apache.
Ensure that you are logged on to a correctly configured OpenStack client and can access the OpenStack environment that has Ansible installed.
Ansible executes playbooks of tasks. In this example, we will extend the task that launches a specific instance to allow Ansible to then connect to that instance and install Apache:
We start off by extending the Ansible playbook introduced in the previous recipe to include the creation...