Prepare Ansible Inventory File to Install Confluent Platform

Before running the Ansible playbooks, you need to generate an inventory file. The inventory file tells Ansible the hosts in which to provision Confluent Platform components. For more information about the Ansible inventory file, see Ansible Inventory Basics.

Generate an inventory file

To generate an inventory file, gather all of the Fully Qualified Domain Names of your hosts and create a file called hosts.yml on your Ansible control node, setting each hostname under the desired groups as shown below.

zookeeper:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-34-246.us-east-2.compute.internal:
    ip-172-31-37-15.us-east-2.compute.internal:
    ip-172-31-34-231.us-east-2.compute.internal:

kafka_broker:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-34-246.us-east-2.compute.internal:
    ip-172-31-34-247.us-east-2.compute.internal:
    ip-172-31-34-248.us-east-2.compute.internal:

schema_registry:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-34-246.us-east-2.compute.internal:

kafka_rest:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-34-246.us-east-2.compute.internal:

ksql:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-37-15.us-east-2.compute.internal:
    ip-172-31-37-16.us-east-2.compute.internal:

kafka_connect:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-34-246.us-east-2.compute.internal:

control_center:
  hosts:
    ip-172-31-37-15.us-east-2.compute.internal:

Verify connection to Confluent Platform hosts

After generating an inventory file, set connection variables so that the Ansible control node can connect to each Confluent Platform host.

Most commonly, Ansible uses SSH for its connections. For more information about setting up connection variables, see Connecting to hosts: behavioral inventory parameters.

Add the following section to hosts.yml:

all:
  vars:
    ansible_connection: ssh
    ansible_user: ec2-user
    ansible_become: true
    ansible_ssh_private_key_file: /tmp/certs/ssh_priv.pem

Use the following command to verify that Ansible can connect over SSH:

ansible -i /path/to/hosts.yml all -m ping

It is recommended that you store your inventory file in its own Git repository. You may have a Git repo with an inventory file for each of your deployments.