What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower (formerly 'AWX') is a web-based solution that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It's designed to be the hub for all of your automation tasks. Tower is free for usage for up to 10 nodes, and comes bundled with amazing support from Ansible, Inc.

Correspondingly, what is the use of Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower is the easy-to-use UI and dashboard and REST API for Ansible. Centralize your Ansible infrastructure from a modern UI, featuring role-based access control, job scheduling, and graphical inventory management. Tower's REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes.

Furthermore, what is Ansible and why it is used? Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.

In this regard, what is the difference between Ansible and Ansible Tower?

Unlike several other CM apps, Ansible does not utilize a master-and-minions setup – this is the main difference between it and the other big boys in the CM arena Puppet, Chef, CFEngine and Salt. Ansible Tower is a web-based interface for managing Ansible. Ansible management came up with Ansible Tower in response.

What is an Ansible Tower node?

Understanding Ansible Tower Isolated Nodes. “A Tower Isolated Node is a headless Ansible Tower node that can be used for local execution capacity, either in a constrained networking environment such as a DMZ or VPC, or in a remote data center for local execution capacity.

36 Related Question Answers Found

Is Ansible written in Python?

Ansible itself is written in Python and has a fairly minimal learning curve. Ansible follows a simple setup procedure and does not depend on any additional software, servers or client daemons. It manages nodes over SSH and is parallel by default.

Is Ansible still free?

Yes, Ansible is an absolutely free and open source tool that is used for the above-mentioned purposes. Ansible Tower provides a neat graphical user interface with a dashboard using which one can group the hosts, variables, jobs, etc. Ansible AWX is free i.e an open source upstream project for Ansible Tower.

How do I set up Ansible Tower?

Below are the steps you'll use to install Ansible Tower on a CentOS 7 server.

Step 1: Update system and add EPEL repository. We need the EPEL repository for this installation.
Step 2: Download Ansible Tower archive. Download the latest Ansible Tower release.
Step 3: Install Ansible Tower.
Step 4: Configure Ansible Tower.

Can we use Ansible for Windows?

No, Ansible cannot run on a Windows host and can only manage Windows hosts, but Ansible can be run under the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The Windows Subsystem for Linux is not supported by Microsoft or Ansible and should not be used for production systems.

Is Ansible better than puppet?

In very, very, short, there are some differences between Ansible and Puppet. However, Puppet is more of a configuration management tool, whereas Ansible is more of a provisioning, configuration and deployment tool.

Is Ansible tower open source?

Red Hat and Ansible are committed to creating a world-class open source project around the Ansible Tower codebase. With the announcement of the AWX project, it is now officially open sourced. We encourage you to join the Ansible Community.

What is Ansible used for?

Ansible is an open source IT Configuration Management, Deployment & Orchestration tool. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments.

What language is Ansible?

Ansible (software)

Original author(s)	Michael DeHaan
Written in	Python, PowerShell, Shell, Ruby
Operating system	Linux, Unix-like, MacOS, Windows
Available in	English
Type	Configuration management, infrastructure as code (IaC), Orchestration engine

Does Ansible cost money?

Ansible Engine pricing ranges from $47.50-$70 per managed node per year depending on quantity, subscription term, and support option selected. Ansible is an open source project, therefore you can use the unsupported community edition for free. We sell packages for 100, 5,000, and 10,000 managed nodes.

What can Ansible automate?

Ansible can automate IT environments whether they are hosted on traditional bare metal servers, virtualization platforms, or in the cloud. It can also automate the configuration of a wide range of systems and devices such as databases, storage devices, networks, firewalls, and many others.

What is Ansible engine?

Ansible Engine is the simplest way to automate your IT infrastructure. Ansible is an automation solution that acts as a resource provisioner, configuration management tool, application release automation, and can provision and manage entire application and infrastructure environments.

What is Awx?

AWX is the open source project behind Red Hat^® Ansible^® Tower, offering developers access to the latest features, and the opportunity to directly collaborate with the Ansible Tower engineering team. AWX is built to run on top of the Ansible project, enhancing the already powerful automation engine.

Is Ansible a Red Hat product?

Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Ansible Automation Platform helps you automate nearly every aspect of clouds configured by Red Hat OpenStack® Platform. Automate cloud service deployments, cloud infrastructure operations (with help from more than 50 modules), and even cloud-based apps.

What is Chef framework?

Chef is a company and the name of a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef contains solutions for both small and large scale systems, with features and pricing for the respective ranges.

What does Awx stand for?

Ansible Web eXecutable (AWX)

How do I make an Ansible playbook?

On this page

Step 1 - Setup Ansible Playbook Project.
Step 2 - Generate Ansible Roles for the Directory Structure.
Step 3 - Setup hosts and site.yml.
Step 3 - Setup Common Roles.
Step 4 - Setup 'web' Roles.
Step 5 - Setup 'db' Roles.
Step 6 - Run the Ansible Playbook.
Step 7 - Testing.

What is Ansible vault?

Ansible Vault is a feature of ansible that allows you to keep sensitive data such as passwords or keys in encrypted files, rather than as plaintext in playbooks or roles. Alternately, you may specify the location of a password file or command Ansible to always prompt for the password in your ansible. cfg file.