Advanced Ansible Usage: Managing Playbooks with Ansible Tower and AWX

In the previous article on developing custom modules, we explored how to create and use custom modules to extend Ansible’s capabilities. In this article, we delve into using Ansible’s graphical management tools—Ansible Tower and its open-source counterpart, AWX. These tools significantly enhance operational efficiency and provide intuitive, visual management for day-to-day infrastructure automation.

Introduction to Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower is a commercial product offered by Red Hat, designed to help teams manage and monitor Ansible execution at scale. It provides multi-user support, role-based access control (RBAC), workflow orchestration, and a comprehensive REST API for automation. Additionally, Tower features a streamlined web interface that makes task management intuitive and accessible.

AWX is the open-source upstream project of Ansible Tower, offering nearly identical functionality—but without official Red Hat support. For users seeking Tower’s powerful features without licensing costs, AWX is an excellent alternative.

Installing AWX

AWX can be easily deployed using Docker. Below are the steps to install AWX:

1. Clone the AWX repository:

   git clone https://github.com/ansible/awx.git
   cd awx/installer
   

2. Run the installation playbook:

   ansible-playbook -i inventory install.yml
   

This builds and deploys AWX in Docker containers. Once installation completes, you can access AWX at http://<your-server-ip>:8042.

Core Features of Ansible Tower / AWX

1. Organization and Project Management

In Tower/AWX, resources are grouped into Organizations, each of which may contain multiple Projects. A Project represents a Git repository containing your Ansible playbooks, inventories, and related files.

Creating an Organization and Project:

tower-cli organization create --name "My Organization"
tower-cli project create --name "My Project" --organization "My Organization" --scm-type git --scm-url "https://github.com/my-repo.git"

2. Job Templates

Job Templates define how and when a playbook runs—including the target inventory, credentials, extra variables, and other runtime parameters. They simplify repetitive execution and enable one-click launching directly from the AWX UI.

Creating a Job Template:
In the AWX web interface, navigate to Templates → Add → Job Template, then fill in required fields such as:

• Name: Deploy Application
• Project: My Project
• Inventory: All Hosts
• Playbook: deploy.yml

3. Scheduled Jobs

You can schedule jobs to run automatically—for example, daily database backups.

tower-cli job template launch --name "Backup Database" --schedule "0 3 * * *"

This command schedules the “Backup Database” job to run every day at 3:00 AM.

4. Monitoring and Auditing

Ansible Tower provides detailed audit logs for all job executions—including status, start/end times, duration, and full stdout/stderr output. This is invaluable for troubleshooting, compliance reporting, and operational auditing.

In AWX, you can inspect each job’s execution details—including timestamps, runtime metrics, and complete log output—directly from the UI.

5. REST API and Webhooks

Tower/AWX exposes a robust REST API, enabling seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI), internal dashboards, or custom automation platforms. You can programmatically launch jobs, retrieve results, manage credentials, and more.

For example, launch a job template via API:

curl -k -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer <your-token>" "https://<your-awx-url>/api/v2/job_templates/<job-template-id>/launch/"

Real-World Use Case

Suppose your company performs nightly system updates across production infrastructure. Here's how Tower/AWX streamlines that process:

1. Write the Playbook:

   ---
   - name: Update all packages
     hosts: all
     tasks:
       - name: Upgrade all packages
         apt:
           upgrade: dist
   

2. Upload the playbook to AWX, create a corresponding Job Template, and configure it to run daily at 11:00 PM.

3. Generate reports—aggregate job results (success/failure rates, host-level outcomes), and automatically publish them to your enterprise document-sharing platform (e.g., Confluence or SharePoint) so all stakeholders stay informed.

Summary

Ansible Tower and AWX deliver powerful, enterprise-grade capabilities for managing infrastructure automation at scale. With structured resource organization, intuitive job templating, granular audit logging, and a flexible REST API, these tools dramatically improve visibility, consistency, and operational velocity.

In our next article, we’ll explore Ansible performance tuning techniques and proven best practices—helping you build faster, more reliable, and highly scalable automation workflows. Stay tuned!