Before we look at installing the tools, we should first take the time to discuss why we need them and also the differences between them.

I am sure you are starting to notice a common thread between all of the playbooks we have covered so far—where possible, we are allowing the roles we are running to use as many parameters as possible. This makes it easy for us to change the output of the playbook run without having to rewrite or edit the roles directly. For this reason, it should also be easy for us to start using one of the two web-based tools provided by Red Hat for managing your Ansible deployments.

Ansible Tower is a commercially licensed, web-based graphical interface for Ansible. As already mentioned, you might be struggling to see the value in this. Imagine being able to hook Ansible up to your company's active directory and have users, such as developers, use Ansible Tower to deploy their own environments based on your playbooks, providing a controlled way for you to maintain consistency across your estate while allowing self-service.

When Red Hat announced its acquisition of Ansible in October 2015, one of the questions in the FAQ it published on the day of the announcement was: Will Red Hat open source all of Ansible's technology? The reason the question was asked was that with other technologies Red Hat has acquired over the years, it has open sourced almost all aspects of them to not only invite community contributions, but to test and build new features, which eventually made their way into Red Hat's commercially supported version.

An example of this is the Fedora project. This project is the open source upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux features—which Fedora users are taking advantage of now—including DNF, a YUM replacement. This has been the default package manager in Fedora since 2015 and, if everything goes as planned, it should make its way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Other examples of Red Hat open sourcing its technologies include WildFly, which is an upstream for JBoss, and the ManageIQ, which is sponsored by Red Hat and is the basis for Red Hat CloudForms.

In September 2017, Red Hat announced it would be releasing Ansible AWX, an open source upstream for Ansible Tower. This project would have fortnightly releases with the AWX team, making select releases stable, although in this case, stable does not mean production ready as the project is still in its initial development cycle.