Ansible Tower

In this article, we will delve into the key features and benefits of Ansible Tower, exploring how it addresses the challenges of modern IT operations. From configuration management and application deployment to dynamic inventory management and compliance auditing, Ansible Tower offers a comprehensive solution for organizations seeking to enhance efficiency, consistency, and scalability in their automation initiatives.

Join us on a journey through the capabilities of Ansible Tower, as we uncover real-world use cases, examine its role in prominent organizations, and showcase the transformative power it brings to IT automation. Whether you are an IT professional looking to optimize workflows or a decision-maker evaluating automation solutions, Ansible Tower promises to be a compelling force in reshaping the future of IT operations.

What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower is an enterprise-grade management console and UI that helps to operationalize and scale Ansible automation in organizations. Developed by Red Hat and now known as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Tower provides a centralized and user-friendly interface for automating, managing, and orchestrating IT infrastructure and application deployments at scale.

At its core, Ansible Tower is designed to simplify and enhance the use of Ansible, which is known for its simplicity, flexibility, and agentless nature. Ansible is used for automating a wide range of tasks, from configuration management to application deployment, across various environments, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid cloud setups.

It helps organizations and teams scale quickly and effectively. There is a cost associated with adopting it, installing it, and getting the software up and running in your environment. Ansible Tower offers more control than the free version and is a great platform for breaking down silos, as it can be used cross-functionally in an efficient manner.

Benefits of Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower is a scalable adoption strategy that, as your automation adoption grows, will be integral to quicker automation solutions. Here are a few of its benefits:

• A graphical user interface dashboard
• Role-based access control
• Job scheduling
• Graphical inventory management. A multi-playbook workflow
• RESTful APIs
• External logging integrations
• Real-time job status updates
• Red Hat technical support
• Red Hat Customer Portal access

Key Features of Ansible Tower

Key features and capabilities of Ansible Tower include:

1. Centralized control: Ansible Tower provides a single dashboard to control and manage all your Ansible infrastructure, playbooks, inventories, credentials etc. This simplifies the management of automation playbooks, reducing the need to manually run Ansible commands on individual machines.
2. Role-based access control (RBAC): Tower allows managing users and teams with fine- grained permissions. This enhances security and allows collaboration between teams by limiting access. You can define different user roles and permissions, allowing you to control who can access and modify automation jobs, inventory, and other resources.
3. Restful API: Tower provides APIs to integrate and manage Tower using external tools and custom scripts. Helps achieve automation and devops goals. This API provides programmatic access to automate and extend Ansible Tower’s functionality.
4. Scheduling : Jobs and workflows can be scheduled to run repeatedly at certain times or dates. This enables automation while reducing human intervention. Allowing you to automate routine tasks, maintenance, and other operations. It also enables you to trigger automation tasks in response to specific events or changes in your infrastructure.
5. Graphical interface: Tower provides a web-based graphical interface to visualize inventories, launch jobs, monitor performance etc. Easy to create, manage, and run Ansible playbooks and automation tasks without the need to use the command line. This user-friendly interface is particularly useful for individuals who are not familiar with the command-line interface.
6. Credential management: Ansible Tower allows you to securely store and manage sensitive credentials, such as SSH keys and passwords, within the platform. This reduces the need to expose sensitive information in your automation scripts.
7. Ansible updates: Tower helps keep your Ansible playbooks and roles updated by tracking code changes in source control. Ensures consistency.
8. Notifications and logging: It provides notifications through various channels, such as email and messaging services, as well as comprehensive logging and audit trails to track job status and results.
9. Enterprise scalability: Tower is designed for large organizations with complex hybrid environments. It brings scalability, governance and visibility. It can scale to accommodate the needs of growing enterprises.
10. Support and Maintenance: Being a Red Hat product, Ansible Tower benefits from professional support, security updates, and ongoing maintenance. This ensures the platform’s stability and security.
11. Inventory Management: Ansible Tower simplifies the management of inventories, including dynamic inventories that can automatically update based on predefined criteria. This ensures that your inventory is always up-to-date.
12. Integration: It can be integrated with various external systems and tools, including version control systems, cloud platforms, monitoring solutions, and more. This enables comprehensive automation and orchestration across your entire technology stack.

In summary, Ansible Tower provides enterprise scalability, security and governance on top of Ansible for automating infrastructure, deployments and application environments. It provides centralized control, scheduling, notifications and monitoring of your Ansible estate.

How to use Ansible Tower?

Here is an overview of how to use Ansible Tower:

1. Installation: Install and configure the Ansible Tower server software either on-premises or using Ansible Tower cloud. Ensure prerequisites like Ansible is installed.
2. Inventory: Create an inventory of your managed hosts and group them logically for organization. Inventory can be manually added or synced from a CMDB.
3. Credentials: Add and store credentials like SSH keys, passwords, certificates needed for Ansible to access your hosts. Credential permissions can be set.
4. Projects: Set up source code projects in Tower by pointing to local Git/SVN repositories containing your Ansible playbooks.
5. Templates: Create job templates that map Ansible playbook code to an inventory to be executed. Set needed privilege escalation, variables etc.
6. Workflows: Design workflows to link playbooks and templates together for complex deployments. Set conditions, notifications etc.
7. Schedule jobs: Schedule template runs at later times or set recurring schedules. Useful for automated patchings, backups etc.
8. Launch jobs: Launch templates manually to instantly run Ansible jobs when needed. The web GUI shows real-time output and status.
9. Users and teams: Create users and teams, set permissions on who can access and manage which environments and credentials.
10. Monitor activity: View dashboard, activity stream and logs to monitor job runs, troubleshoot failures and track Ansible activity.
11. Integrations: Use Tower REST API and webhooks to integrate with other tools like Jenkins, ServiceNow etc.

Overall, Ansible Tower allows you to centralize and control your entire Ansible infrastructure and operations from a single, secured and scalable platform.

Steps To Use Ansible Tower

Step 1: Create an Inventory

1. Click on INVENTORIES in the top menu.

2. Name the Inventory and click the green SAVE button.

3. On the next page click the green +ADD HOST button to add a new Host.

4. Name the Host, add VARIABLES and click the green SAVE button

Step 2: Add a Credential

In order to run Playbooks, add a Credential to tell Tower how to log into the target system.

In this example, a blank machine Credential is added. A Username, Password and SSH key can just as easily be added.

1. Click the gear icon in top menu, then select CREDENTIALS.

2. Name the Credential, select TYPE and click the green SAVE button.

Step 3: Create a Project

Next, create a Project where Tower will pull the Playbook from. In this example, the Playbook comes from a GitHub repository.

1. Click on PROJECTS in the top menu.

2. Name the Project, select SCM TYPE, add SOURCE DETAILS and click the green SAVE button.

Step 4: Create a Job Template

Now that all components are built, create a Job Template to tell Tower how to run the Playbook.

1. Click on JOB TEMPLATES in the top menu.

2. Name the Job Template.

INVENTORY and PROJECT will be added since only one of each has been created in Tower.

3. Select JOB TYPE, choose a PLAYBOOK and click the green SAVE button.

4. Click on JOB TEMPLATES in the top menu and click the rocket ship icon to run the Job.

Examples of How Ansible Tower Can Be Used ?

Certainly! Ansible Tower can be used in a variety of scenarios to automate and manage IT infrastructure. Here are some examples of how Ansible Tower can be employed:

1. Configuration Management

• Scenario: Ensuring consistent configurations across servers.
• Use Case: Use Ansible Tower to schedule playbook runs that apply and enforce specific configurations on a group of servers. This ensures uniformity and reduces the risk of configuration drift.

2. Application Deployment

• Scenario: Deploying applications across multiple servers.
• Use Case: Create Ansible playbooks to deploy applications, and use Ansible Tower to execute these playbooks on specific servers or groups of servers. This simplifies the deployment process and allows for easy scaling.

3. Patch Management

• Scenario: Keeping servers up to date with the latest patches.
• Use Case: Schedule Ansible Tower jobs to run playbooks that apply system updates and patches on a regular basis. This helps maintain security and compliance by ensuring that servers are consistently updated.

4. Dynamic Inventory Management

• Scenario: Managing a dynamic infrastructure with frequently changing hosts.
• Use Case: Utilize Ansible Tower to configure dynamic inventories that automatically update based on changes in your infrastructure. This is particularly useful in cloud environments where instances are created or terminated dynamically.

5. Scheduled Backups

• Scenario: Automating regular backups of critical data.
• Use Case: Develop Ansible playbooks to perform backup tasks, and schedule these playbooks using Ansible Tower. This ensures that backups are conducted at specified intervals, reducing the risk of data loss.

6. Compliance and Security Audits:

• Scenario: Ensuring systems comply with security policies and industry regulations.
• Use Case: Implement Ansible playbooks that perform security checks and compliance audits. Schedule these playbooks with Ansible Tower to run periodically, providing insights into the security posture of your infrastructure.

7. Multi-Tier Application Deployment

• Scenario: Deploying complex, multi-tier applications.
• Use Case: Use Ansible Tower to orchestrate the deployment of multi-tier applications by creating workflows that coordinate the execution of various playbooks. This ensures a coordinated and consistent deployment process.

8. User and Access Management

• Scenario: Managing user accounts and access permissions.
• Use Case: Employ Ansible playbooks to automate user provisioning, role assignments, and access configurations. Ansible Tower’s RBAC features help control and audit these processes.

9. Integration with Version Control

• Scenario: Incorporating version control systems into automation workflows.
• Use Case: Integrate Ansible Tower with version control systems like Git to automatically pull the latest versions of playbooks. This ensures that the automation processes are based on the latest code and configurations.

10. Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning

• Scenario: Automating the creation of cloud resources.
• Use Case: Utilize Ansible Tower to launch playbooks that provision and configure resources in cloud environments. This enables dynamic scaling and the rapid deployment of infrastructure.

These examples showcase the versatility of Ansible Tower in automating a wide range of IT tasks and processes, ultimately improving efficiency, consistency, and scalability in managing infrastructure and applications.

Case Studies of Organizations using Ansible Tower ?

Here are some real-world examples and case studies of organizations using Ansible Tower:

1. Adobe

Adobe uses Ansible Tower to automate provisioning of development environments for its cloud infrastructure. This accelerated their development cycles and allowed faster innovation.

2. Mozilla

Mozilla migrated their server fleet to Ansible Tower for configuration management and orchestration. This provided stability and reproducibility to their infrastructure.

3. NASA

• Scenario: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has utilized Ansible Tower for automation in managing the infrastructure supporting space exploration missions.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower helps automate tasks related to server provisioning, configuration management, and ensuring consistency across their infrastructure.

4. Volkswagen

• Scenario: Volkswagen has employed Ansible Tower to automate IT processes within its global infrastructure.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower is used for configuration management, application deployment, and ensuring compliance across a large and diverse IT landscape.

5. Intuit

• Scenario: Intuit, the financial software company, has integrated Ansible Tower into its IT operations.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower is used to automate repetitive tasks, including server provisioning, application deployment, and managing configurations, leading to increased efficiency.

6. American Express

• Scenario: American Express has implemented Ansible Tower for automation in its IT environment.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower is employed for tasks such as automating infrastructure provisioning, ensuring compliance, and improving the speed of application

deployments.

7. Devoteam

• Scenario: Devoteam, a multinational IT consulting company, has used Ansible Tower to enhance automation capabilities for its clients.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower is applied for automating infrastructure management, improving operational efficiency, and ensuring consistency in IT environments.

8. General Electric (GE)

• Scenario: GE has utilized Ansible and Ansible Tower for automation in its IT infrastructure.
• Use Case: Ansible Tower is used to automate repetitive tasks, allowing GE to achieve consistency and reliability in their IT operations.

When exploring case studies, it’s important to note that the specific use cases and benefits can vary widely based on the organization’s unique requirements and goals. Ansible Tower is known for its flexibility and scalability, making it applicable across diverse industries and IT environments.

FAQs On Ansible Tower

1. Ansible Tower vs Ansible

Ansible tower and Ansible are both used for the configuration management but Ansible tower is an Provides a web-based interface for managing playbooks and Ansible is an Command-line interaction tool.

2. Ansible Tower Pricing

Ansible tower is available in three plans or editions as mentioned below.

Standard	Premium	Enterprise
For 50 nodes you will be charged around 4000-5000 dollars a year.	For 100 nodes you will be charged around 130000 to 14000 dollars per year.	If your requirement is high and you want to unlimited nodes then you will be charged 25000 to 28000 dollars.

3. Ansible Tower API

Ansible tower API is an RESTful API by which you can automate tasks and helps you to manage the Ansible Tower environments.

4. Ansible Open Source

Ansible CLI is an opensource platform by which you can configure the required software into the virtual machines.