Ansible Tower and its Use cases

Hello everyone,

In this article, I am gonna share my technical experience of Workshop with Redhat Experts.

Terminologies

In this workshop, we have worked on certain terminologies, that are:

• Ansible Tower
• Template
• Playbook
• Integration of AWS
• CI/CD
• Integration with Slack
• Integration with Oracle cloud

How to scale ?Automation can help!!!

• Focus on many small tasks rather than a big complex process.
• Review what others have automated
• Treat automation like software
• Think out of the box.

Note: Ansible’s YAML is easier to understand and can be learnt easily.

Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower(formerly AWX) is a web-based solution that makes Ansible more easy to use. It is designed to be the hub for all types of automation tasks. Tower is free to use for upto 10 nodes and it has amazing support from ansible.

There may be a situation when the Controller Node (The handler node) get down, this situation will be called as single point of failure that may lead to down of complete automation. But Ansible Tower have some architecture that can handle this kind of situation, i.e.,

Ansible tower gives a clustering feature, in this we can have multiple Ansible Tower deployed and they can share a common database which is PostgreSQL and by using that we can have redundancy for our Automation and can scale the automation even if the Controller node goes down.

Template

Template is a terminology in Ansible to discover the playbook. The credentials os the AWS account can be added in the Template section in the credentials option. In Normal Ansible, we need to add the Access key and the secret key in the Playbook itself, but in Ansible tower we can create one.

Note: We can add some level of verbosity also, to get some extra insights of the process that is working behind the scene.

After adding the playbook, we just need to click the launch button to start the processing of our Ansible playbook.

Orchestration

Orchestration is a step-by-step automation in which if one automation fails then alternate steps can be used to save that failed Automation.

Beside this, we have worked on Continuous integration/Continuous Delivery inside the Ansible tower only.

• * With Workflow in Ansible Tower we can run Multiple playbooks, with some customized flow!!!

Ansible Collections

Collections are a distributed format for Ansible content that can include playbooks, roles, modules and plugin.

Automation is a core fundamental aspect, we cannot avoid Automation!!

There can be a lot of interesting and useful integrations with Ansible concepts and power of Ansible tower.