Up and running with Ansible AWX / Tower

This month’s Automation Workshop is titled “Up and Running with Ansible Tower/AWX”. Similar to past sessions, there will be a light deck (~10 slides) to help set the stage for our demonstration, where we’ll be walking through the following topics:
- provisioning the necessary Kubernetes environment
- installing Ansible Tower (AWX)
- setting up credentials, projects, templates, and organizations
- connecting AWX to Netbox for dynamic inventory
- building and publishing an Execution Environment container
- executing playbooks from the API

[@MrZombiefox]

This is really good video, very informative, great to see how AWX can be built and integrated with other services.

[@SimonLeinen]

That was a long watch, but totally worth it. I now have a good idea of what it takes to set up an AWX environment to the point where it is useful, and how AWX looks to a network (dev)op. I had been curious about that for quite some time. I also enjoyed the presentation style very much: Enough scripting to get the important points across, but flexible enough to deal with questions (thanks for those as well!) in depth. And it's actually great for some things to go wrong, so that we also see how to debug things... the peril/joy of a live session. Thanks a ton!

[@ganesh634]

Very informative and well structured workshop. Thank you for doing this!

[@Woodoosticka]

Dude! You’re awesome! Subbed after fighting trying to get this stuff working all day across multiple distros. Not the biggest *nix person but learning more and more every day!

[@LampJustin]

Thank you so much for this extensive walkthrough! It was great!

[@AmolGautam]

thanks for the video.

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

You're welcome

[@guidyouguy7306]

really cool man

[@nachi160]

great one !!! if you could it will be great help if you can show EE for local inventory plugin(not collection)

[@enderpiyale]

I would like to hear kubernates from you especially from networking perspective for sure

[@deekum93]

That's the good tutorial, thanks for uploading..can you please provide a tutorial on how can I use the azure container registory to create a new custom EE?

[@abdmec6484]

Thank you so much for these tutorials! They are my main resource next to the original docs. In case I don't have access to a lab environment where I can practice. Is there a way to extend the Kubernetes cluster with Ubuntu or CentOS containers/pods? That way it'd be easy to have a virtual lab on a single machine (my laptop) as a sandbox... Do you think this is doable?

[@aaroncoulter3462]

1:53:20 This is exactly what I’m trying to do. Having device configs saved in some container is not useful at all. How can I write the config files to my Gitlab repository?

[@Lines-In-The-Sand1]

Who knew that Joe Pavelski knew so much about Ansible (jk, great video and thanks for it)

[@miren1439]

Hello, I have been working for a week with a awx deployment over k3s. I do not have any experience with this technology. Watching your video I realized that I need to create a custom execution environment because I need to persist backup data. If I create a custom image can i have configure the image to claim a volume that persist data in my local filesystem? I have running in my deployment a volume that it is shared for all the containers within awx pods but I do not know if I can a volume to persist data on the flie...so I think the only way it doing a custom image...am I right?

[@pouriya_bp]

Thanks for these tutorials, i want to know how to create the EE for netbox; can you give some resource?

[@chrisnavarro5122]

Kudos Sir! by the way - just an inquiry sir, very new to AWX, so when you save the retrieved configurations onto the created directory, how can we validate that directory if indeed the files are there inside the AWX/Linux? When I created new playbook to run configs/scripts from that created directory - its says Path not found error?

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

Hey Chris, sorry for the long delay :/ Debugging what is or is not within a container isn't as easy as we'd hope. I would start by adding some `debug` tasks within your playbook to see if you can't check for the files or path.

[@edgardoscrimaglia148]

@@CalvinRemsburg0 Hi Calving, the problem @Chris Navarro is having is that next playbook/job template runs in another container so no data form previous playbook/job because old container are destroyed. Im going through the same thing and so far, cant figure out how to make AWX/Tower has persistence. I have not finishing watching your video yet but any clue will be really appreciated. Many Thanks

[@MrFRankor]

This video is great! Do you have a cheat sheet on how to deploy the Ansible EE? I have problem getting the EE to authenticate with my device.

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

Hello Fran, I have some content in the cooker for that request. Thanks for the suggestion!

[@Lines-In-The-Sand1]

Any chance you can update the description with the links to your public gitlab sutff? I am having trouble getting to any of it

[@NikolaTesla-yx8gu]

I am getting error selinux-policy-base >= 3.14.3-67 needed at 32:20 . But only able to find rpms selinux-policy-minimum, selinux-policy-targeted, selinux-policy versin >=3.14.3-67. Not able to find latest for selinux-policy-base . This is happenning on the k3s installation step. Could you please help.

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

Hello Nikola, unfortunately Ansible AWX has had another big shift in their deployment and I'll need to reshoot this session. The things we covered in this video were relevant for about ten days. Another casualty of being on the bleeding edge :D

[@cloudnixiass]

Ansible AWX 22.7 / Tower End to end video in 21 minutes kzbin.info/www/bejne/oKOYon-vjKaEgMksi=1MqikuIpsMvzi63a

[@a143r]

can you provide the source code used in Demo please, thanks

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

Hello Rutwik, unfortunately Ansible AWX has had another big shift in their deployment and I'll need to reshoot this session.

[@neronblg]

your gitlab is not working anymore ?

[@unstoppable-ar3292]

hey dude loved the presentation, I have previously installed awx using docker container and docker compose several times, however, I'm doing it this time for my company and I'm wondering if that's the proper way anymore. I'm following your set-up guide step by step(I'm a noob in k3s) and I'm stuck at 43:03. error is error validating "awx.yaml" error validating data: validation error (AWX) : unknown field "metadata" in com.ansible.awx.v1beta1.AWX Any feedback would be appreciated. and yes liked and subbed. keep up the great work

[@CalvinRemsburg0]

Hello, I remember running into this as well but cannot replicate it since AWX is deployed through a new mechanism. I'll try recording an updated session for everyone