Ansible & Friends Newsletter
September 14, 2017 - Issue 67
All About AWX
Many of you will have heard the big news by now:
There's an open-source option for Ansible Tower users!
AWX is the new open-source upstream project for Ansible Tower, similar to how Fedora is the upstream project for Red Hat Enterpris Linux (RHEL).
From Jeff Geerling:
- Overview of AWX
- AWX Galaxy Role
- Get Started with AWX in 1 Minute (using docker compose)
(this is the method I used to give AWX a quick whirl)
AWX Logos
Tired of being poked in the eye with an angry potato? The default AWX logos are... jarring.
Here's an alternative logo set for AWX I put together for a simpler look:
(Update: I had a very simple logo here earlier, but it included the letters 'AWX', so Red Hat asked me to change it, so now it's just a blank 'logo' for an ULTRA simple look)
Ansible: Up & Running — 2nd Edition Released!
The first edition by Lorin Hochstein was great, and now René Moser has joined as a co-author to create this updated and expanded edition. Get it on Amazon.
ARA Updates
"ARA and AWX are not competing. Different use cases and can be used together or by themselves. Let's collaborate to make Ansible awesome++" — @dmsimard
Jeff Geerling
Jeff sure loves him some Ansible! I'm constantly coming across the tools and posts he leaves in his wake. He quickly put out great resources for AWX right after the release, but somehow also found time for these treats too:
- Patching or using a forked version of an Ansible Galaxy role
- Quick way to check if you're in AWS in an Ansible playbook
- Slow Ansible playbook? Check ansible.cfg!
- Changing a deeply-nested dict variable in an Ansible playbook
- Self-signed certificates via Ansible for local testing with Nginx
- Add a path to the global $PATH with Ansible
If you don't have his Ansible for DevOps book yet, it is currently on sale.
Ansible Updates
Ansible 2.4 is in Release Candidate mode, check out the new features.
Points of Interest
Decoupling Ansible Handlers —René Moser
Using Molecule V2 to test Ansible Roles —Werner Dijkerman
How to Reference Ansible Variables Between Plays —liquidat
How To Use Vault to Protect Sensitive Ansible Data —Justin Ellingwood
Using Ansible for Deploying Serverless Applications —Ryan Scott Brown
Hierarchical Data Lookups with Ansible —Craig Dunn
Manage Exoscale DNS with Ansible —René Moser
How to use Ansible Variables and Vaults —DevBlog