Ansible has an ever growing list of modules. For a single module this raises the question: who is responsible for it? And what is the actual status? Here a new metadata field will most likely be introduced soon. With Ansible getting more and more traction every day, more modules are popping up everywhere – most […]

Ansible Tower 3.1 was just released. Time to have a closer look at some of the new features like the workflow editor.

Just a few days ago, Ansible Tower 3.1 was released. Besides the usual bug fixes, refinements of the UI and similar things this Tower version comes with major new feature: a workflow editor, scale out clustering, integration with logging providers and a new job details page.

The basic idea of a workflow is to link multiple job templates coming one after the other. They may or may not share inventory, playbooks or even permissions. The links can be conditional: if job template A succeeds, job template B is automatically executed afterwards, but in case of failure, job template C will be run. And the workflows are not even limited to job templates, but can also include project or inventory updates.

This enables new applications for Tower: besides the rather simple execution of prepared job templates, now different workflows can build upon each other. Imagine the networking team which creates a playbooks with their own content, in their own Git repository and even targeting their own inventory, while the operations team also has their own repos, playbooks and inventory. With older Tower versions there would be no simple way to bring these totally separated ways together – with 3.1 this can be done even with a graphical editor.

Workflows can be created right from the job template page. As can be seen that page got an overhaul:

The button to add a new template offers a small arrow to get a menu from which a workflow can be set up.

Afterwards, the workflow needs to be defined – name, organization, etc. This is a necessary step, before the actual links can be created:

As shown in the screenshot above from this screen on the actual editor can be started. And I must admit that I was surprised of how simple but yet rather elegant the editor looks like and works. It takes hardly any time to get used to, and the result is visually appealing and easily understandable:

The above screenshot shows the major highlights: links depending on the result of the previous job template in red and green, blue links which are executed every time, a task in the workflow to update a project (indicated by the “P”), and the actual editor.

As mentioned at the beginning, there are more features in this new Tower release. The clustering feature is an explicitly interesting feature for load balancing and HA setups, though I have not tested it yet. Another possibility is the integration of logging providers right into the UI:

As shown above a logstash logging provider was configured to gather all the Tower logs. Other possible providers are splunk, and in general everything which understands REST calls.

A change I yet have to get familiar with is the new view on the jobs page, showing running or completed jobs:

Job running Job finished

The new view is much more tailored to the output of ansible-playbook, showing the time at each task. Also, a search bar has been added which can be used to search through the results rather easily. Each taks can be clicked at to get much more details about the task. However, in the old view I liked the possibility to simply click through a play and the single tasks, getting the list of hosts adjusted automatically, etc. I can already see that the change will be for the better – but I have to get used to it first 😉

Overall the new release is pretty impressive. Especially the workflow editor will massively help bringing different teams even closer in automation (DevOps, anyone?). Also, the cluster feature will certainly help create stable, HA like setups of Tower. The UI might take some time to get used to, but that’s ok, since there will be a benefit at the end.

So, it is a great release – get started now!