Explore Ansible Tower Interface

This blog is an exploration of the Ansible Tower interface, but before I dive in, let's begin with an overview of what Ansible is. 

Ansible is a software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment tool that is also open-source from Red Hat. Ansible assists IT with the major challenge of enabling continuous deployment (CI/CD) with no downtime. 

With Ansible IT organizations can automate the provisioning of applications, manage systems, and reduce the complexities that come with trying to automate IT. With Ansible we can break down silos and create a culture around automation. My thought has always been that if you need to preform a task more than once then it should be automated.

Ansible integrates with the technologies you have already made investments within your organization, from infrastructure, to networks, security, cloud, containers, and applications. We all have infrastructure whether it be physical bare metal environments like networking with Cisco, Juniper, and Arista, to storage with products like Net App, and Pure Storage. 

Virtual infrastructure with VMware is also supported along with Red Hat Virtualization(RHV), and Xenserver.  Through Ansible organization can easily provision, destroy, take inventory, and manage across all virtual environments. 

Regardless of of platform, Ansible can help organizations with managing the installation of software, system updates, configuration, and managing system features.

Ansible Tower brings a web-based UI to Ansible which makes it a little easier for IT to perform the above mentioned tasks. Ansible Tower is the hub, of sorts, that gives IT a role-based access control, including control over the use of securely stored credentials for SSH and other services.

​Let's take a few minutes to look at the Ansible Tower interface.

Ansible Tower Interface

On the left hand side of the Dashboard, you can see the resources menu and the objects that you can create. 

• Templates - A job template combines the credential, project, and inventory into an executable.
• Credentials - A credential allows Ansible to authenticate to the target hosts.
• Projects - A Project is a scope code repository containing Ansible objects such as playbooks.
• Inventories - An inventory is a list of target hosts.
• Inventory Scripts - An inventory script supports dynamic inventories. 

 ​
Let us dive a little more into each section beginning with Credentials. In this section, you create a credential that Ansible can use to authenticate to the target hosts. 

Creating Credentials

From the resources section of the menu:

1. Select Credentials.
   
2. On the right and side, as you can see from the above picture, click on the green + icon.
   
3. Once clicked the New Credentials section opens above. From this screen we can create the new credential required for Ansible to use. 

Remember: Credentials are used by Ansible Tower for authentication when launching jobs against machines, synchronizing with inventory sources, and working with project content. IT organizations can then grant users and teams the ability to use these credentials, without exposing the credentials to the user. This is helpful if a user leaves the organization, you no longer have to re-key all the systems.

The following fields are available:

• Name
• Description
• Organization
• Credential Type
• Username
• Password
• Privilege Escalation Method
• Privilege Escalation Username
• Privilege Escalation Password
• SSH Private Key
• Singed SSH Certificate
• Private Key Phrase

Fill out the fields that correspond to the credentials you are creating and then click on save. 

In my example above, I am creating a machine credential type but there are many to choose from.

The following credential types are supported with Ansible Tower:

• Amazon Web Services
• Ansible Tower
• GitHub Personal Access Token
• GitLab Personal Access Token
• Google Compute Engine
• Insights
• Machine
• Microsoft Azure Resource Manager
• Network
• OpenShift or Kubernetes API Bearer Token
• OpenStack
• Red Hat CloudForms
• Red Hat Satellite 6
• Red Hat Virtualization
• Source Control
• Vault
• VMware vCenter

Let's shift and discuss projects.

Projects

What is a project? A logical collection of Ansible Playbooks represented in Ansible Tower. Playbooks a and playbook directories are managed by placing them manually under the project base path on your Tower serer or by placing your playbooks into a source code management system (SCM) supported by Ansible Tower such as Git. 

To work with projects:

1. From the right side resource menu, select Projects. 
2. Once open, click the green + icon.
3. Complete the New Project form.
   1. Name
   2. Description
   3. Organization
   4. SCM Type
      1. Manual
      2. Git
      3. Mercurial
      4. Subversion
      5. Red Hat Insights
   5. SCM URL
   6. SCM Branch/Tag/Commit
   7. SCM REFSPEC
   8. SCM Credential
   9. SCM Update Options
      1. Clean
      2. Delete on Update
      3. Update Revision on Launch
      4. Allow Branch Override
   10. Click Save

Note: If you choose Update Revision on Launch then you will be prompted for Cache Timeout.

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Inventories

An inventory is a collection of hosts which jobs may be launched against. Inventory lists may be sorted by Name, Type, or Organization. They are divided into groups which may contain actual hosts. 

To create an inventory:

1. From the Resource menu in the sidebar, select Inventories
2. On the right, click the green+ icon
3. Select Inventory from the list (Smart Inventory is also available)
4. Complete the New Inventory form:
   1. Name
   2. Description
   3. Organization
   4. Insights Credential
   5. Instance Groups
   6. Click Save when complete

​For more on Inventories see the Ansible Documentation.

Job Templates

Templates are a set of parameters for running an Ansible job. Job templates execute the same job many times. 

To create a job template:

1. From the Resources menu in the sidebar, select Templates
2. On the right, click the green + icon
3. Select the Job Template (Workflow Templates can also be selected)
4. Complete the Apache Basic Job Template 
   1. Name
   2. Description
   3. Job Type
      1. Run
      2. Check
      3. Scan
   4. Inventory
   5. Project
   6. Playbook
   7. Credentials
   8. Forks
   9. Limit
   10. Verbosity
       1. Normal
       2. Verbose
       3. More Verbose
       4. Debug
       5. Connection Debug
   11. Job Tags
   12. Skip Tags
   13. Labels
   14. Instance Groups
   15. Job Slicing
   16. Timeout
   17. Show Changes
   18. Options
       1. Enable Privilege Escalation
       2. Enable Provisioning Callbacks
          1. Host Config Key
       3. Enable Webhook
          1. Webhook Service
          2. Webhook Credential
       4. Enable Concurrent Jobs
       5. Enable Fact Cache

We have just scratched the surface to Ansible Tower with a quick look at the UI and some of the options available to IT organizations.