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Advanced Ansible Tower Usage

Introduction

Ansible Tower is a powerful tool for managing complex IT environments by automating and orchestrating repetitive tasks. This tutorial will cover advanced usage of Ansible Tower, including workflow management, custom inventories, job templates, and more.

Setting Up Advanced Workflows

Workflows in Ansible Tower allow you to chain multiple job templates together. This is useful for orchestrating complex deployments that require multiple steps.

Example: Creating a Workflow

To create a workflow, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Templates section and click + Add.
  2. Select Workflow Template.
  3. Fill in the necessary details and click Save.
  4. Click on the Start button to add nodes to your workflow.
  5. Define the job templates to be used in each node, and connect them as needed.

Using Custom Inventories

Ansible Tower supports the use of custom inventories, which can be dynamically generated or manually created.

Example: Creating a Custom Inventory

To create a custom inventory:

  1. Navigate to the Inventories section and click + Add.
  2. Fill in the inventory name and description.
  3. Click on Hosts to add individual hosts, or Groups to add host groups.
  4. For dynamic inventories, you can use custom scripts or integrate with cloud providers like AWS.

Creating and Managing Job Templates

Job templates define the playbooks and configurations that will be executed by Ansible Tower.

Example: Creating a Job Template

To create a job template:

  1. Navigate to the Templates section and click + Add.
  2. Select Job Template.
  3. Fill in the necessary details, such as name, inventory, and playbook.
  4. Click Save to create the job template.

Advanced Scheduling

Ansible Tower provides robust scheduling capabilities, allowing you to run jobs at specified times.

Example: Scheduling a Job

To schedule a job:

  1. Navigate to the Schedules section under the job template you want to schedule.
  2. Click + Add to create a new schedule.
  3. Set the desired time, frequency, and other parameters.
  4. Click Save to schedule the job.

Using Tower CLI

The Ansible Tower CLI allows you to interact with Tower from the command line, providing an alternative to the web interface.

Example: Installing and Using Tower CLI

To install Tower CLI:

pip install ansible-tower-cli

To configure Tower CLI, use the following command:

tower-cli config host 
tower-cli config username 
tower-cli config password

To list all job templates:

tower-cli job_template list
+----+---------------------+-------------+ | id | name | description | +----+---------------------+-------------+ | 1 | Deploy_App | | | 2 | Backup_Database | | +----+---------------------+-------------+

Integrating with External Systems

Ansible Tower can be integrated with various external systems using webhooks, REST API, and other mechanisms.

Example: Using Webhooks

To use webhooks:

  1. Navigate to the Templates section and select the job template you want to trigger.
  2. Click on the Webhooks tab.
  3. Enable the webhook and copy the provided URL.
  4. Configure your external system to send a POST request to this URL to trigger the job.

Conclusion

By mastering advanced features of Ansible Tower, you can significantly improve your ability to automate and manage complex IT environments. This tutorial covered workflows, custom inventories, job templates, scheduling, Tower CLI, and external integrations.