ansible tower

Get started using Ansible AWX (Open Source Tower version) in one minute

Since yesterday's announcement that Ansible had released the code behind Ansible Tower, AWX, under an open source license, I've been working on an AWX Ansible role, a demo AWX Vagrant VM, and an AWX Ansible Container project.

As part of that last project, I have published two public Docker Hub images, awx_web and awx_task, which can be used with a docker-compose.yml file to build AWX locally in about as much time as it takes to download the Docker images:

Ansible open sources Ansible Tower with AWX

Ever since Red Hat acquired Ansible, I and many others have anticipated whether or when Ansible Tower would be open sourced. Ansible Tower is one of the nicest automation tools I've used... but since I haven't been on a project with the budget to support the Tower licensing fees, I have only used it for testing small-scale projects.

I wrote a guide for Automating your Automation with Ansible Tower, and it's both on the web and in Chapter 11 of Ansible for DevOps, and in the guide, I wrote:

For smaller teams, especially when everyone on the team is well-versed in how to use Ansible, YAML syntax, and follows security best practices with playbooks and variables files, using the CLI can be a sustainable approach... Ansible Tower provides a great mechanism for team-based Ansible usage.