This is a configuration template (i.e. an Ansible Playbook) to customize your environment in the European Weather Cloud (EWC).

The template is designed to:

• Provision an instance via Terraform, with your specified Linux distribution and desired flavor (a.k.a VM plan):

  • If a terraform.tfstate state file is not found under the user-defined directory, attempts to create the instance from scratch

  OR

  • if terraform.tfstate file is found, leverages Terraform's out-of-the-box functionality to update the instance referenced on it

• Configure the existing or newly provisioned instance to connect to an IPA server running on the same subnet, such that it:

  • Is remotely accessible via public key or password to centrally managed LDAP users
  • Is able to leverage DNS resolution and discover other private hosts or public addresses

After successful provisioning, you can take advantage of Terraform built-in functionality to safely modify or delete the instance. You'll find the definition of your instance in main.tf, and its current state in terraform.tfstate, under the user-defined tf_project_path directory.

To learn the basics about managing infrastructure with Terraform, checkout the official documentation examples.

Prerequisites

💡 Versions listed correspond to minimal prerequisites.

To successfully run this playbook, the following packages should be available in your work environment:

Usage

1. Download Ansible dependencies

💡 By default, Ansible Roles are installed under the ~/.ansible/roles directory within your working environment.

Download the correct version of the Ansible dependencies, if you haven't done so already:

ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml

2. Configure and apply the template

2.1. Interactive Mode

By running the following command, you can trigger an interactive session that prompts you for the necessary user inputs, and then applies changes to your target EWC environment:

ansible-playbook ipa-client-provisioning.yml

2.2. Non-Interactive Mode

💡 To learn more about defining variables at runtime, checkout the official Ansible documentation.

You can also run in non-interactive mode by passing the --extra-vars or -e flag, followed by a map of key-value pairs; one for each and every available input (see inputs section below). For example:

ansible-playbook \
  -e '{
        "ewc_provider": "eumetsat",
        "tf_project_path": "~/iac/ipa-client-1",
        "app_name": "ipa",
        "instance_name": "client",
        "instance_index": 1,
        "flavor_name": "eo2.medium",
        "image_name": "ubuntu-22.04-20250204105649",
        "public_keypair_name": "john-claudy-publickey",
        "private_keypair_path": "~/.ssh/id_rsa",
        "private_network_name": "private",
        "security_group_name": "ipa",
        "instance_has_fip": "no",
        "ipa_domain": "eumetsat.sandbox.ewc",
        "ipa_server_hostname": "ipa-server-1",
        "ipa_admin_username": "iapadmin",
        "ipa_admin_password": "my-secret-password"
    }' \
  ipa-client-provisioning.yml

Inputs

Dependencies

⚠️ Only Ubuntu 22.04 and RockyLinux 8.10 VM images are currently supported. This is due to constrains imposed by the required ewc-ansible-role-ipa-client-enroll Ansible Role.