This document introduces Ansible Tower, a commercial GUI tool for managing environments with Ansible, offering features like API access and role-based access. It contrasts Ansible Tower with the open-source Ansible AWX, highlighting the latter's faster development but lesser stability for enterprise use. Key setup requirements for Ansible Tower and ways to install it are also outlined.

1. Presented By: Nitin Mishra
(Software Consultant)
Quickstart to Ansible Tower

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3. Our Agenda
01
01
What and Why of Ansible Tower?
02
03
04 Exploring Ansible Tower UI
Demo
05
Setup
Tower vs AWX

4. What is Ansible Tower ?
● It is the commercial GUI Ansible tool.
● It provides the officially supported GUI interface, API access, role-based access, scheduling, notifications, and other nice
features that allow businesses to manage environments easily with Ansible.
● Ansible Tower is a commercial ‘pay for’ product that comes in two versions – Standard and Premium. Looking at the
two versions, the prices range as follows :
○ Standard - $13,000/year, up to 100 nodes, 8x5 support
○ Premium - $17,500/year, up to 100 nodes, 24x7 support

5. Ansible AWX
● Ansible AWX is the open-sourced project that was the foundation on which Ansible Tower was created.
● Ansible AWX provides all of the features and functionality from Ansible Tower in a freely available format.
● Red Hat Tower is based on AWX.
● AWX is designed to be a frequently released, fast-moving project where all new development happens.
● Driven by open source community.
More about awx here

6. Ansible Tower vs AWX
Red Hat provides two tools for centralized Ansible management with a GUI tool.
● Ansible Tower
● Ansible AWX
AWX is a development branch. Frequent changes are introduced and can be released with only
minimal testing. This can limit adoption across an enterprise.
Customers can count on receiving the latest product versions with the stability and security they have
come to expect from Red Hat.
for more here.

7. What to choose, Tower or AWX?
This decision basically comes down to stability and support. Most likely, in an enterprise production
environment, stability and support are extremely important.
Ansible Tower is the supported enterprise automation platform that provides a stable, fully-tested, and
supported release for both greenfield installations and upgrading. For production environments, Tower is
definitely the product to choose.
Ansible AWX is free to download and is a great tool for use in non-production development or lab
environments.

8. Tower Setup
Prerequisite:
● Supported OSeS
○ RHEL 7.7 or later 64-bit (x86)
○ CentOS 7.7 or later 64-bit (x86)
● 2 CPUs minimum and 4 GB RAM minimum
● 20 GB of dedicated hard disk space
● 64-bit support required (kernel and runtime)
● PostgreSQL version 10.x required to run Ansible Tower 3.7 and later.
● Ansible version 2.9 required
● For Amazon EC2:
○ Instance size of m4.large or larger
○ An instance size of m4.xlarge or larger if there are more than 100 hosts
Ways to Setup :
● vagrant
● Using EC2 instance
● docker container

9. Demo:

10. Thank You !
Get in touch with us:
DevOps Studio, Knoldus | NashTech
Noida, India