How to control AWS EC2 live from a web app [closed]

We are building some penetration testing stations (both attack & target) for a hackathon in AWS VPC and I need a way to control the following in a live setting:

• VPN connection access: if someone does something bad, or misbehaves in the forums, we need a way to revoke their access immediately

• EC2 state reset (we will probably use Ansible for this)

What I envision is a nice clean dashboard with squares for each user and a kill switch. The app itself is outside scope of the Q but you get my idea.

Is there a way to control AWS like this from a web app? Is CDK capable of handling this? It doesn't appear as though Terraform is suitable.

Solution 1:

Since it sounds like you already have plans to use Ansible. I would suggest using Ansible for all related tasks. It sounds like the VPN connections will be using AWS VPN, which also has modules in Ansible. A full list of all Ansible Cloud Modules can be found here

As for having a web dashboard, you'll need another tool for something like that. The two that come to mind are Rundeck Community or AWX, the open-source upstream of Ansible Tower. Both provide a Web API that would allow you to send requests.

Once you have either of those set up you can choose to either use their built-in web interface or roll your own. In either case, you don't need to have a button for every user, instead, you can just pass their username to the Ansible Playbook as a variable.