1. Overview¶

Thank you for your interest in Ansible Tower. Tower is a graphically-enabled framework accessible via a web interface and a REST API endpoint for Ansible, the open source IT orchestration engine. Whether sharing operations tasks with your team or integrating with Ansible through the Tower REST API, Tower provides many powerful tools to make your automation life easier.

1.1. Real-time Playbook Output and Exploration¶

Watch playbooks run in real time, seeing each host as they check in. Easily go back and explore the results for specific tasks and hosts in great detail. Search for specific plays or hosts and see just those results, or quickly zero in on errors that need to be corrected.

1.2. “Push Button” Automation¶

Access your favorite projects and re-trigger execution from the web interface with a minimum of clicking. Tower will ask for input variables, prompt for your credentials, kick off and monitor the job, and display results and host history over time.

1.3. Role Based Access Control and Auditing¶

Ansible Tower allows delegating specific authority to different teams or explicit users. Keep some projects private. Allow some users to edit inventory and others to run playbooks against only certain systems–either in check (dry run) or live mode. Allow certain users to use credentials without exposing the credentials to them. Regardless of what you do, tower records the history of operations and who made them–including objects edited and jobs launched.

1.4. Cloud & Autoscaling Flexibility¶

Tower features a powerful provisioning callback feature that allows nodes to request configuration on demand. While optional, this is an ideal solution for a cloud auto-scaling scenario, integrating with provisioning servers like Cobbler, or when dealing with managed systems with unpredictable uptimes. Requiring no management software to be installed on remote nodes, the callback solution can be triggered via a simple call to ‘curl’ or ‘wget’, and is easily embeddable in init scripts, kickstarts, or preseeds. Access is controlled such that only machines in inventory can request configuration.

1.5. The Ideal RESTful API¶

The Tower REST API is the ideal RESTful API for a systems management application, with all resources fully discoverable, paginated, searchable, and well modeled. A styled API browser allows API exploration from the API root at http://<Tower server name>/api/, showing off every resource and relation. Everything that can be done in the user interface can be done in the API - and more.

1.6. Backup and Restore¶

The ability to backup and restore your system(s) has been integrated into the Tower setup playbook, making it easy for you to backup and replicate your Tower instance as needed.

1.7. Ansible Galaxy Integration¶

When it comes to describing your automation, everyone repeats the DRY mantra–”Don’t Repeat Yourself.” Using centralized copies of Ansible roles, such as in Ansible Galaxy, allows you to bring that philosophy to your playbooks. By including an Ansible Galaxy requirements.yml file in your project directory, Tower automatically fetches the roles your playbook needs from Galaxy, GitHub, or your local source control. Refer to Ansible Galaxy Support for more information.

1.8. Inventory Support for OpenStack¶

Ansible is committed to making OpenStack simple for everyone to use. As part of that, dynamic inventory support has been added for OpenStack. This allows you to easily target any of the virtual machines or images that you’re running in your OpenStack cloud.

1.9. Remote Command Execution¶

Often times, you just need to do a simple task on a few hosts, whether it’s add a single user, update a single security vulnerability, or restart a misbehaving service. Beginning with version 2.2.0, Tower includes remote command execution–any task that you can describe as a single Ansible play can be run on a host or group of hosts in your inventory, allowing you to get managing your systems quickly and easily. Plus, it is all backed by Tower’s RBAC engine and detailed audit logging, removing any questions regarding who has done what to what machines.

1.10. System Tracking¶

Introduced in version 2.2.0, Tower’s System Tracking brings a new level of visibility to your infrastructure–you can see exactly what is happening on your systems, comparing it to both the prior state of the system and to other systems in your cluster, which helps you to ensure compliance. The rich and extensible store of data available in System Tracking is accessible via Tower’s REST API, enabling you to feed it into other tools and systems.