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:

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:

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