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Ansible AWX Overview

During this brief lesson, we will review the history of the Ansible ecosystem and a quick overview of the UI.

Quick Ansible History

A brief history of Ansible, Ansible Tower, AWX, and Ansible Automation Platform:

  • Ansible Core:
    • Ansible was created by Michael DeHaan and introduced in 2012. It quickly grew in popularity due to its simplicity and agent-less design.
    • Acquisition by Red Hat: In 2015, Red Hat acquired Ansible.
    • Acquisition by IBM or Red Hat tn 2019, including the Ansible portfolio
  • Ansible Tower:
    • Originally released in 2013.
    • Ansible Tower was introduced as the commercial offering built on top of Ansible.
    • It provided a web-based UI, an API, role-based access controls, and other enterprise features not found in the open-source Ansible.
  • Ansible AWX:
    • In 2017, Red Hat decided to open-source the code for Ansible Tower.
    • The idea behind AWX was to foster community engagement and accelerate the development of new features. Once features are tested and matured in AWX, they would potentially make their way into the commercial Ansible Tower.
    • While AWX offers many of the same features as Ansible Tower, it lacks official Red Hat support and some enterprise features.
    • Release cycle: the AWX team currently plans to release new builds approximately every 2 weeks. The AWX team will flag certain builds as “stable” at their discretion.
  • Ansible Automation Platform
    • In 2019, Red Hat introduced the Ansible Automation Platform.
    • This platform replaced Ansible Tower and encapsulated support for the Ansible product.
    • The platform offers Automation Analytics, Automation Hub (a place for certified Ansible content), and integrations with other Red Hat products
    • With the Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat aimed to provide an end-to-end automation solution that goes beyond configuration management and playbooks, encompassing use cases across various domains, including network automation, security, and more.

Summary

Ansible started as a simple, open-source automation tool and quickly evolved into a comprehensive platform with both community-driven and commercial offerings. With the introduction of Ansible Tower, it gained enterprise appeal, and the subsequent open-sourcing of Tower as AWX broadened community involvement. The Ansible Automation Platform marks Red Hat's vision of Ansible as more than just a configuration management tool, envisioning it Red Hat's integral part of the modern IT landscape.

AWX Dashboard

Upon entering Ansible AWX, the dashboard provides a summarized view of your automation landscape. Designed to give you immediate feedback on your automation jobs' health, it's the starting point for a deeper dive into your automated processes.

  • Job Status - The dashboard showcases a color-coded breakdown of the recent job statuses. At a glance, you can discern successful runs (green), failed runs (red), and other statuses.
    • Based on job type, can determine how often SCM, Inventory, and Playbook run.
  • Quick Links - The dashboard features shortcuts to commonly accessed areas like job templates or inventory by clicking the cards.
  • Activity Stream - You can view the most recent activities, such as Recent Jobs and Recent template modifications. This running log is helpful for tracking changes and monitoring the general activity in AWX.

The Ansible AWX dashboard, in its essence, is designed for clarity and quick insights.

Organization

In Ansible AWX, the "Organizations" section serves as the highest level in the AWX object hierarchy. It is designed to be a logical grouping of users, teams, projects, and inventories, providing a framework for role-based access control and multi-tenancy.

  • User and Team Management
  • Projects and Inventories Association
  • Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
  • Multi-Tenancy

In essence, the Organizations section in Ansible AWX provides a structured way to manage resources, users, access control, and resource allocation.

Users and Teams

In Ansible AWX, managing users and organizing allows you to obtain fine-grained access controls. The "Users" and "Teams" sections serve distinct but interrelated purposes:

  • Users - Individual Account
    • Authentication - Manual or integrated authentication systems, such as LDAP, SAML, or social authentication services.
    • Personal Access Tokens - Users can generate tokens for API access.
    • Role Assignments - Individual users can be granted specific roles.
  • Teams- Grouping Users for Collaboration and Access Control
    • Grouping Mechanism - Teams serve as a way to group users together.
    • Simplified Role Assignment - Instead of assigning roles to individual users you can assign roles to a team.
  • Combining Users and Teams provides Hierarchical Permissions