msg: No handler was ready to authenticate. 1 handlers were checked. ['HmacAuthV4Handler'] Check your credentials
<p>So I am trying to run ansible on my ec2 instances on aws, for the first time on a fresh instance, but every time I try to run a play I can't get around this error message:</p>

<pre><code>PLAY [localhost]
**************************************************************

TASK: [make one instance]
***************************************************** 
failed: [localhost] =&gt; {"failed": true} msg: No handler was ready to
authenticate. 1 handlers were checked. ['HmacAuthV4Handler'] Check
your credentials

FATAL: all hosts have already failed -- aborting

PLAY RECAP
********************************************************************
   to retry, use: --limit @/home/ubuntu/ans_test.retry

localhost                  : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=0   
failed=1
</code></pre>

<p>I think there may be something wrong with the permissions in my IAM user and group.  I have given my IAM user and group ReadOnlyAccess, AdministratorAccess and PowerUserAccess. I have an access id and secret access key that I am setting as environmental variable with the commands:</p>

<pre><code>   export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID='AK123'
   export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY='abc123'
</code></pre>

<p>With 'AK123'and 'abc123' replaced with my actual id and key values.  What else do I need to do in order to get the ansible ec2 task working?</p>

<p>UPDATE:<br>
I fixed the problem, I guess I didn't really have a solid understanding of what environmental variables are. I fixed it by just setting my aws_access_key and aws_secret_key inside of my ec2 task, below is my working playbook</p>

<pre><code>- hosts: localhost  
  connection: local  
  gather_facts: False  

  tasks:  
    #this task creates 5 ec2 instances that are all named demo and are copies of the image specified  
    - name: Provision a set of instances  
      ec2:  
         aws_access_key: .....  
         aws_secret_key: ....  
         key_name: .....  
         group: .....  
         instance_type: t2.micro  
         image: ......  
         region: us-east-1  
         ec2_url: .......  
         wait: true  
         exact_count: 5  
         count_tag:  
            Name: Demo  
         instance_tags:  
            Name: Demo  
      register: ec2  
</code></pre>

<p>I guess now I need to start using ansible vault to just hold my key and ID.</p>