Introduction to Ansible Tower

What You Will Learn

Red Hat® Ansible® Tower helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling and graphical inventory management.


  • What is Ansible Tower
  • How Ansible Tower Works
  • Installing Ansible Tower
  • Key Features

What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower is an enterprise framework for controlling, securing and managing your Ansible automation – with a UI and RESTful API


  • Role-based access control keeps environments secure, and teams efficient
  • Non-privileged users can safely deploy entire applications with push-button deployment access
  • All Ansible automations are centrally logged, ensuring complete auditability and compliance

Platform Overview

Installing Ansible Tower


# the most common and preferred way of
# installation for RHEL (Preferred) or Ubuntu
$ wget https://bit.ly/ansibletower

# bundled installer can be downloaded for
# RHEL (and select derivatives) at
$ wget https://bit.ly/ansibletowerbundle

# looking for a specific version? navigate to http://releases.ansible.com/ansible-tower
# to see all the versions available for download

Server Requirements

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 (and select derivatives), Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit support required (kernel and runtime).
  • A currently supported version of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
  • 2 GB RAM minimum (4+ GB RAM highly recommended)
  • 20 GB of dedicated hard disk space

Demo Time:
Installing Ansible Tower

Workshop:
Installing Ansible Tower

Key Features of Ansible Tower

  • Dashboard and User Interface
  • User Base -- Organizations, Teams & Users
  • Credentials
  • Inventories
  • Projects
  • Job Templates & Jobs
  • Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

Dashboard and User Interface

User Base


A user is an account to access Ansible Tower and its services given the permissions granted to it.

An organization is a logical collection of users, teams, projects, inventories and more. All entities belong to an organization with the exception of users.

Teams provide a means to implement role-based access control schemes and delegate responsibilities across organizations.

Credentials

Credentials are utilized by Ansible Tower for authentication with various external resources:

  • Connecting to remote machines to run jobs
  • Syncing with inventory sources
  • Importing project content from version control systems
  • Connecting to and managing networking devices

Centralized management of various credentials allows end users to leverage a secret without ever exposing that secret to them.

Inventory

Inventory is a collection of hosts (nodes) with associated data and groupings that Ansible Tower can connect to and manage.

  • Hosts (nodes)
  • Groups
  • Inventory-specific data (variables)
  • Static or dynamic sources

Projects

A Project is a logical collection of Ansible Playbooks, represented in Ansible Tower.

You can manage Playbooks and Playbook directories by placing them in a source code management system supported by Ansible Tower, including Git, Subversion, and Mercurial.

Job Templates

A job template is a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible Playbook.

Job templates are useful to execute the same job many times and encourage the reuse of Ansible Playbook content and collaboration between teams.

Jobs

A job is an instance of Ansible Tower launching an Ansible Playbook against an inventory of hosts.

  • Job results can be easily viewed
  • View the standard out for a more in-depth look

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) are built into Ansible Tower and allow administrators to delegate access to server inventories, organizations, and more. These controls allow Ansible Tower to help you increase security and streamline management of your Ansible automation.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)


Demo Time:
Ansible Tower Basic Setup
& Job Run

Workshop:
Ansible Tower Basic Setup
& Your First Job Run

Dynamic Inventory in Ansible Tower

Dynamic inventory is a script that queries a service, like a cloud provider API or a management application. This data is formatted in an Ansible-specific JSON data structure and is used in lieu of static inventory files.

  • Groups are generated based on host metadata
  • Single source of truth saves time, avoids duplication and reduces human error
  • Dynamic and static inventory sources can be used together

Demo:
Ansible Tower Dynamic Inventory

More with Ansible Tower

  • Job Status Updates
  • Activity Stream
  • Integrated Notifications
  • Schedule Jobs
  • Manage and Track Your Inventory
  • Self Service IT (User Surveys)
  • Remote Command Execution
  • External Logging
  • Multi-Playbook Workflows

Job Status Update

Heads-up NOC-style automation dashboard displays everything going on in your Ansible environment.

Activity Stream

Securely stores every Job that runs, and enables you to view them later, or export details through Ansible Tower’s API.

Integrated Notifications

Stay informed of your automation status via integrated notifications. Connect Slack, Hipchat, SMS, email and more.

Schedule Jobs

Enables you to schedule any Job now, later, or forever.

Manage and Track Your Inventory

Ansible Tower’s inventory syncing and provisioning callbacks allow nodes to request configuration on demand, enabling auto-scaling.

Self Service IT

Ansible Tower lets you launch Playbooks with just a single click. It can prompt you for variables, let you choose from available secure credentials and monitor the resulting deployments.

Remote Command Execution

Run simple tasks on any hosts with Ansible Tower's remote command execution. Add users or groups, reset passwords, restart a malfunctioning service or patch a critical security issue, quickly.

External Logging

Connect Ansible Tower to your external logging and analytics provider to perform analysis of automation and event correlation across your entire environment.

Multi-Playbook Workflows

Ansible Tower’s multi-Playbook workflows chains any number of Playbooks together to create a single workflow. Different Jobs can be run depending on success or failure of the prior Playbook.

Next Steps

  • It’s easy to get started
    ansible.com/get-started
  • Try Ansible Tower for free:
    ansible.com/tower-trial
  • Would you like to learn a lot more?
    redhat.com/en/services/training/do409-automation-ansible-ii-ansible-tower