The first thing we need to discuss is how we can pass our access key ID and also the secret access key to Ansible in a safe and secure way. As I will be sharing the final playbooks in a public repository on GitHub, I do not want to share my AWS keys with the world as that could get expensive! Typically, if it were a private repository, I would use Ansible Vault to encrypt the keys and include them in there with other potentially sensitive data such as deployment keys and so on.
In this case, I don't want to include any encrypted information in the repository as it would mean that people would need to unencrypt it, edit the values, and then re-encrypt it. Luckily, the AWS modules provided by Ansible allows you to set two environment variables on your Ansible controller; those variables will then be read as part of the playbook execution.
To set the variables...
