Ansible, Inc. has announced Tower 2.0, an upgrade to its orchestration, configuration management, and application deployment software for DevOps teams.
Ansible is an open source IT automation project. Ansible Tower is a user interface (UI) and dashboard designed to help DevOps teams centralize their Ansible IT automation.
CEO at Ansible Saïd Ziouani reminds us that Ansible Tower is used as DevOps tool in organizations like NASA, GoPro, EA and Hughes. "Ansible Tower enhances the Ansible open source engine by providing role-based access control, Ansible job scheduling, auditing, and graphical inventory management," he said.
The product has a REST API to simplify embedding Ansible Tower into existing infrastructure tools, and the Ansible Tower CLI tool allows administrators to take advantage of Tower features without leaving the command line. In this latest version, the Tower UI is simplified and includes new features.
Tower 2.0 allows users to observe application deployments, updates, and system configuration changes in real-time, with the ability to drill-down on any failures. It features real-time output of Ansible Playbooks, including dynamic progress bars that show the status of jobs and hosts, along with the overall status of the Playbook run.
Along with existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace, Tower 2.0 now supports dynamic inventory synchronization with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and VMware's vSphere. In addition, Amazon Web Services inventory now provides improved support for categorizing the multitude of groups and tags it automatically creates.