It is clear that Ansible is an incredibly powerful and versatile automation tool, lending itself well to managing an entire estate of servers and network devices. Mundane, repetitive tasks can be made repeatable and straightforward with ease, hence a great deal of time can be saved! Obviously, this is of great benefit in a corporate environment, but this power comes at a price. If everyone has their own copy of Ansible on their own machines, how do you know who ran what and when? How do you ensure that all playbooks are correctly stored and version-controlled? Indeed, how do you prevent the proliferation of superuser-level access credentials across your organization while benefiting from the power of Ansible?

The answer to these questions comes in the form of AWX, an open source enterprise management system for Ansible. AWX is the open source, upstream version of the commercial Ansible Tower software available from Red Hat, and it offers virtually the same features and benefits, but without the support or stable release cycle that Red Hat offers. It must be said that AWX could warrant its own book, but in this chapter, we hope to give you enough information to get up and running with the basics of AWX, and the thirst for further exploration, should you so desire.

We will cover the following in this chapter:

• Getting AWX up and running
• Integrating AWX with your first playbook
• Going beyond the basics