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Introduction
Welcome Techies!
We all are well aware of the growing technological advancements, and there is increasing competition between Tech giants. IT companies are looking for solutions to help them scale quickly and effectively.
Let’s know about this interesting IT automation tool and add something extra to our knowledge!
About Ansible Tower
Ansible Tower is an enterprise-level version of Ansible. It is a web-based management system with an easy user interface that gives a dashboard with all of the hosts' state summaries. Furthermore, it enables rapid installations and monitors all configurations.
The tower allows us to share SSH (Secure Shell) credentials without exposing them, logs all jobs, manages inventory graphically, and syncs them with many cloud providers.
Previously, Ansible Tower, also known as the AWX project, was the solution to this problem. Particularly those that benefit from graphical rather than textual output, such as real-time node monitoring.
To use Ansible Tower, you must first obtain a license. The tower comes with a free trial license that lets you and your team to test it out.
Tower is currently only available for the following operating systems:
RHEL 7 and 8 are Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions.
CentOS 6 & 7
16.04 (Ubuntu)
Ansible Tower is a commercial solution that is available in two versions: standard and premium. You can compare the prices of these two variants to determine which is the greatest fit for your needs.
Ansible Vs Ansible Tower
Ansible
Ansible is a tool for IT automation. It is an open-source configuration, deployment, and orchestration tool that interfaces with many aspects of your technology stack, including networking, security, application deployment, storage, software development lifecycle processes, and so on.
Ansible is agentless, powerful, and simple, which makes it easy to set up and use. Ansible can get a new administrator up and running in hours.
Ansible Tower
Ansible Tower is Ansible's enterprise version, enabling organizations and teams to scale rapidly and effectively. Adopting it, installing it, and getting the software up and operating in your surroundings all come at a cost. Ansible Tower provides greater control than the free version and iit can be utilized cross-functionally.
Features of Ansible Tower
Let us have a look at the key features of Ansible Tower.
Ansible Tower Dashboard
It provides information about your Ansible environment, such as inventory status, recent job activity, hosts, etc.
Multi-Playbook Workflows
It allows you to link any number of playbooks, use separate inventories, run different users, or use other credentials.
Real-Time Job Updates
Ansible is capable of automating the entire infrastructure. You can also observe real-time work updates such as plays and tasks split down by machine success or failure. As a result, you can monitor the status of your automation and what's coming up next in the queue.
Remote Command Execution
You can use this command to perform simple activities such as restarting any failing service, adding users, and resetting passwords on any server or group of hosts in the inventory.
Self-Service
With this capability, you can launch playbooks with a single click.
Scale Capacity with Cluster
You may join multiple Ansible Tower nodes to form an Ansible Tower cluster, which adds redundancy and capacity, allowing you to scale Ansible automation across the organization.
Inventory Management and Tracking
It maintains your complete infrastructure by pulling inventory from public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and others.
Integrated Notification
This tells you when a job succeeds or fails across the entire enterprise or on a per-job basis.
Schedule Ansible Jobs
It schedules several types of jobs to execute as needed, such as playbook runs, cloud inventory updates, and source control changes.
REST API and Tower CLI Tool
Every function in Ansible Tower is accessible via the REST API, which serves as the suitable API for the systems management architecture.
The CLI( Command Line Interface) tool in Ansible Tower helps launch jobs from CI(Continuous Integration) systems like Jenkins or integrating with other command-line tools.
Prerequisites
Installing the Ansible Tower requires the following prerequisites:
The following operating systems are compatible with Ansible-Tower
64-bit RedHat Enterprise Linux 6
64-bit RedHat Enterprise Linux 7
CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 (both 64-bit)
64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
You should be using the most recent stable release of Ansible.
A 64-bit support kernel, runtime, and a 20 GB hard disc were required.
A minimum of 2 GB RAM is required (4 GB RAM is recommended).
Vagrant trial installations should have at least 2 GB of RAM.
In addition, 4 GB of RAM is suggested /100 forks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the need for Ansible Tower?
Tower allows regulating who has access to what, even permitting sharing SSH credentials without allowing someone to transfer those credentials.
Can Ansible Tower be used for free?
To use Ansible Tower, you must first obtain a license. The tower comes with a free trial license that lets you and your team test it out.
Is Ansible Tower Open Sourced?
Yes, it is now officially open-sourced with the announcement of the AWX(Ansible WorX) project.
How are Ansible and AWX(Ansible WorX) different?
On top of Ansible, AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine. It is an upstream project for Tower, a commercial AWX derivative.
Can Ansible Tower be installed on Windows?
Ansible cannot operate natively on a Windows host. The administrator must install it via the Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a feature introduced by Microsoft with Windows 10 that allows native Linux command-line tools to be used on Windows.
Conclusion
In this blog, we discussed Ansible-Tower in detail. We looked at its working and how it is different from Ansible. We then discussed the important features that make it a successful IT automation tool in the market. Finally, we proceeded to learn about the prerequisites before installing Ansible-Tower.
To learn more about Ansible, refer to the following articles:
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