Sam Doran

My little corner of the Internet

Ansible Tower Open Sourced

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Ansible Tower is one of the most hotly anticipated open source projects in recent memory. People have been asking for an open source version of Ansible Tower very regularly for years. There was even rampant speculation around whether or not Red Hat would even open source it.1

Well, today is the day! Red Hat announced the AWX Project, the upstream of Ansible Tower. AWX runs in containers in OpenShift or directly in Docker and is hosted on GitHub.

It’s been a huge and years long effort by everyone at Ansible. We’re thrilled to open this up to the Ansible community and look forward to the amazing contributions we’ll inevitably get in the future.

I’ve been using Ansible and Ansible Tower for a number of years and have helped lots of folks deploy both large and small scale Ansible Tower deployments. It really is a fantastic way to run Ansible. If you’re just now coming to Ansible Tower/AWX from Ansible, the most powerful features it brings to the table are the API, secure credential storage, job templates2, and the scheduler. Those are the features I find most useful as an avid Ansible user.

Here is the list of things I think give you the most info on the project:

Now go get AWX3!

  1. There was never a doubt internally — we always planned to open source Ansible Tower, but it took time to do it right.↩

  2. I think of Job Templates as a saved shell history. Instead of searching for the ansible-playbook command and all its args, I can save it as a Job Template.↩

  3. And please, for all that is good, stop using Jenkins to run Ansible playbooks. No more excuses!↩