davesmith's picture
davesmith - Tue, 2021/04/13 - 22:54

Hi all,

Having installed AWX a couple of times it would be great if Tunrkey could create a VM image for this please?

Cheers

 

Dave

Forum: 
General
Tags: 
awx
ansible
Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Fri, 2021/04/16 - 06:49

I'm not sure if you've tried it or not, but our latest release of the Ansible appliance now includes Semaphore (a web UI for Ansible). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

FWIW we've had a few requests for AWX, but after doing a bit of research, I'm not super happy about including it. From what I can gather, it's essentially the pre-release "beta" version of "Ansible Tower" and as per most beta software, it mostly works, but sometimes not...

The install looks like a major PITA, which I guess adds value to us providing it. But it also looks like a nightmare to maintain. And that might be problematic to users trying to keep their servers running.

So bottom line, I'm not 100% ruling it out, but I'm not particularly keen.

Let me know what you think of Semaphore and if as an AWX user, it doesn't hit the spot , please share what's missing or wrong with it.

davesmith's picture

davesmith - Fri, 2021/04/16 - 12:03

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for the reply.

So I’ve used AWX for a period of time now in my labs and generally been quite impressed with it. No bugs yet that Im aware of but certainly mindful it's fully capable of having them given it’s a tesing ground for Ansible tower. The reason it's very interesting I think is because;

  • It's virtually identical to Ansible Tower the commercial product and is the most likely product enterprises are likely to deploy.
  • Getting hold of eval licences for Ansible Tower seems almost impossible for learning and lab testing based on my attempts previously. By using AWX gives me both the option of using it my own environments but also allows me to use the commercial Ansible Tower in prod as I can now drive that too.
  • AWX/Ansible Tower seems the most mature product for a Gui Ansible tool so far. I did try Semaphore briefly but it seemed to lack a lot of the functionality found in AWX/Tower.
  • AWX is also I believe available in AWS which also enhances peoples interest in it. 

If you have the time and resources to build this image I personally would say there would be a lot of interest in that product. 

Cheers

Dave

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Fri, 2021/04/16 - 14:26

Your argument certainly adds weight to including it.

Having said that, I just had a quick look and it seems that it only supports docker install?! Is that the case? Unfortunately, our current infrastructure doesn't support install of docker containers. That's something that ideally would be good to resolve, but I won't be able to even consider that until we have a v17.0, Debian 11/Bullseye release (possibly six months or more away by the time the dust settles from that).

Actually looking closer, it appears that the "preferred way to install AWX" is via (the unsupported, alpha AWS Operator which installs to a Kubernetes cluster...! That's way beyond the scope of anything we could package in an ISO...

So I'm still not saying no, but unless we have someone from the community that can lend a hand and help solve some of the hard problems around it, then I'm not sure when we'd be able to do that. We're a pretty small team and already have a fair bit on our plate...

Sorry that I don't have a more encouraging answer.

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