What is Ansible Tower: Installation; Benefits

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Ansible is one of the most demanding automation tools which is very interesting and useful. Before we start understanding what is ansible tower, let us know a little bit about Ansible. Ansible, an open-source automation tool, helps IT organizations automate configuration management, application deployment, and infrastructure provisioning. It uses a simple and easy-to-learn language called YAML to define tasks and playbooks. Ansible simplifies the process of managing IT infrastructure and reduces the time and effort required to perform manual tasks. Furthermore, if you are interested to know more about DevOps, then going for devops training can be a good option, we will mention the best platform where you can learn to automate all the manual tasks with expertise in these platforms. Let us learn about what is ansible tower.

What is Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower is a web-based interface and administration platform for the Ansible open-source IT automation framework. It offers a more all-encompassing method for automating IT operations. It provides a graphical user interface that is easy to use, which makes the process of managing complicated automation activities across a variety of systems and settings much simpler.

Ansible Tower comes with a centralized dashboard that provides a graphical user interface for monitoring task results and automating workflows. This dashboard also allows you to manage Ansible playbooks, timetables, and inventories. In addition to this, it comes with a REST API that can be used to interface with many other tools and systems.

It is a comprehensive management platform for Ansible automation that offers several features to simplify the process of managing complex tasks across multiple systems and environments. Some of the key features explaining what is ansible tower used for:

Role Based action control: You are able to set distinct roles and permissions for individual users or groups of users using role-based access control. This helps to ensure that access to automation tasks is restricted depending on the user's role in the system.
Job Scheduling: Job scheduling is a feature that enables you to schedule automation jobs at certain periods or intervals, guaranteeing that they execute automatically without the need for any involvement from a human.
Job templates: They are a set of pre-configured templates that may be used to automate basic IT processes such as application deployment, configuration management, and system upgrades. These templates are provided by a service that goes by the same name.
Management of inventories: This feature gives you the ability to manage inventory files, which specify the types of systems and environments that Ansible can manage. This is one of the important features that is being used in the team where ansible is mostly used for the automation of manual tasks.
Reporting and analytics: This feature gives you access to a collection of reporting and analytics tools, which enables you to keep tabs on the current state of your task, as well as your performance and compliance with any applicable regulatory standards.

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Some of the prerequisites for using Ansible Tower:

There are some prerequisites that you need to have when you are going to use ansible tower on your machine.

1. The following operating systems support it

· RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 64-bit

· RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 64-bit

· CentOS 6 64-bit

· CentOS 7 64-bit

· Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit

· Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit

· Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64 bit

2. You should have the latest stable release of Ansible.

3. It required a 64-bit support kernel, runtime, and a 20 GB hard disk.

4. A minimum of 2 GB RAM (4 GB RAM recommended) is required.

5. A minimum of 2 GB RAM is recommended for Vagrant trial installations and 4 GB RAM is recommended /for 100 forks

Also Read: DevOps Automation Tools

What are the benefits of using Ansible tower?

The tower is of great importance and below are some of the advantages that the team can have with ansible tower:

Centralized Control

Ansible Tower offers a centralized user interface for the management of automation across a variety of different systems and contexts. Because of this, it will be much simpler for you to monitor and handle automated jobs, as you will be able to oversee your complete infrastructure from a single spot.

Management of inventories

Ansible Tower gives you the ability to maintain inventory files, which specify the kinds of systems and environments that Ansible can manage. Your infrastructure management will become much simpler as a result, and you will have less trouble ensuring that automation activities are carried out on the appropriate systems.

REST API

It has a REST API that may be called upon to facilitate integration with a variety of different tools and systems. Because of this, you will have the ability to automate procedures and simplify your IT operations.

Consolidated Dashboard

It provides a centralized dashboard that gives you an in-depth look at all of the automation operations that are currently being carried out throughout your infrastructure. You are able to immediately detect faults and fix problems thanks to the dashboard, which offers real-time visibility into the progress of jobs.

CI/CD Workflow Support

If we want to develop a CI/CD workflow using Ansible, our code will involve a lot of error handling and conditional expressions. This will make our code convoluted and large, reducing performance.

To tackle this, it is usually advised to develop a large number of basic and short playbooks, and then use Tower to construct a Workflow where we can add those little playbooks to complete our duties sequentially.

Also Read: Benefits of DevOps

How to install Ansible Tower?

Below are some steps that can be used when you are looking to install an Ansible Tower on your machine.

1. Download the Ansible Tower installer package: The Ansible Tower installer package can be downloaded from the Ansible website.

2. Install Ansible on the Ansible Tower host. Ansible needs to be installed on the host in order for Ansible Tower to work. You can use a package manager to install Ansible, or you can download it and install it by hand.

3. Configure the host: You need to set up the host so that it meets Ansible Tower's minimum requirements. This includes setting up the firewall, turning off SELinux, and installing any dependencies that are needed.

4. Run the Ansible Tower installer: Once you've set up the host, you can run the Ansible Tower installer. The installer will walk you through the steps of installing, such as setting up the database, setting up SSL, and making an admin user.

5. Configure Ansible Tower: Once you've installed Ansible Tower, you need to set it up so that it can connect to your infrastructure. This means setting up the inventory, the credentials, and the playbooks.

6. Check the installation: Once you have finished installing and configuring Ansible Tower, you can run a test job to make sure it is working correctly.

Remember that the exact steps you need to take to install Ansible Tower will depend on your environment and needs. It's important to read the Ansible Tower documentation carefully and install it the way it says to.

Pricing of Ansible tower

Red Hat offers Ansible Tower as a commercial offering, with price dependent on the number of managed nodes. Below is an outline of Ansible Tower's current pricing:

Standard: The Standard edition of Ansible Tower is intended for small to medium-sized businesses and supports up to 100 nodes. Ansible Tower Standard begins at $10,000 per year for a licence for 100 nodes.
Premium: The Ansible Tower Premium edition is aimed at bigger enterprises with more complicated automation needs. It supports up to 500 nodes and features such as multi-playbook workflows and job slicing. Ansible Tower Premium pricing begins at $17,500 per year for a 100-node licence.
Enterprise: The Ansible Tower Enterprise edition is intended for very big enterprises with considerable automation needs. It supports an infinite number of nodes and has sophisticated capabilities like task clustering and high availability.

Conclusion

Here in this article, we have learned about what is ansible tower and what the different features are offered by Ansible. There are several benefits that the team can have with ansible tower in their team. As we already know that Ansible is one of the most powerful tools for automation, with the right knowledge and features implementation in the project, the team can have a successful project. We learned about prerequisites and some steps that are needed to use ansible tower.

DevOps and other automation tools have a bright future as the software development lifecycle is getting complex. There are various challenges that the team faces, and these can be resolved with these tools. If you are looking to learn more about this, then going for devops online training can be a good option. But with StarAgile, you can learn from the best professionals who are not only well-qualified in their domain but provide hands-on experience as well. So, if you want to have great opportunities for your career, then going for devops online training is the best way and gives your career a bright opportunity to get the best jobs for you.

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