AWS IAM Policy Statement to Register and Deregister Instances with/from ELB

E.g.

{    "Version": "2012-10-17",    "Statement": [        {            "Sid": "Stmtxxxxxxxxx",            "Effect": "Allow",            "Action": [                "elasticloadbalancing:RegisterInstancesWithLoadBalancer",                "elasticloadbalancing:DeregisterInstancesFromLoadBalancer"            ],            "Resource": [                "arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:aws-region:aws-account-id:loadbalancer/*"            ]        }    ] }

AWS IAM Permissions to Create Tags

Had a hard time getting this to work, and it turns out that only permissions to the "ec2:CreateTags" action is needed, however, the moment the resource is constrained (even to all resources within a specific region), I was unable to tag an EC2 instance. I was only able to tag an EC2 instance when the "Resource" was set to *

{    "Version": "2012-10-17",    "Statement": [        {            "Sid": "Stmtxxxxxxxx",            "Effect": "Allow",            "Action": [                "ec2:CreateTags"            ],            "Resource": [                "*"            ]        }    ] }

Ansible Best Practices: Directory Layout

Here: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_best_practices.html#directory-layout

AWS CloudWatch Logs: Create Log Stream via Command Line

aws logs create-log-stream --log-group-name groupName --log-stream-name streamName

Ansible: Running a Command on the Local Machine

To run an command on the shell of Ansible machine (i.e. instead of the target machine), use the local_action module:

local_action: command xxxxxxxxx

Ansible: EC2 Instance ID Variable

{{ ansible_ec2_instance_id }}

MongoDB: Query for Documents Based On Array Size

db.collectionName.count({"arrayName":{$exists:true},$where:'this.arrayName.length>3'})

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7811163/query-for-documents-where-array-size-is-greater-than-1

Ant Java Compilation Classpath

If there are many jar files in the classpath, instead of specifying all of them, include all jar files in a folder this way: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6103516/ant-adding-multiple-jars-in-classpath-dynamically

Amazon Linux Install Ansible

The YUM method won't work, due to differing python versions.

Use pip instead.

sudo pip install ansible