In this guide, you will embark on a comprehensive journey through AWX, the powerful web-based interface for Ansible. By the end of this guide, you will have gained a thorough understanding of how to leverage AWX to enhance and scale your automation workflows.
Here's a preview of what you'll learn:
Installation and Configuration
You'll start with the essentials of setting up AWX in your environment. We will explore various installation methods, including using Docker and deploying AWX to a Kubernetes cluster. Documentation regarding installation can be overwhelming, but we will simplify the process and guide you through the steps to get AWX up and running.
AWX Organizations, Users, and Teams
Understand how to organize your automation environment by setting up organizations, users, and teams in AWX. Learn how these elements fit together and how they can be used to manage permissions and streamline your automation processes.
Hosts and Inventories
Dive into managing hosts and inventories within AWX. You will learn how to create and manage static and dynamic inventories (e.g., AWS), group hosts, add credentials, and use constructed inventories for more advanced scenarios.
Projects, Templates, and Jobs
Master the core components of AWX by exploring projects, job templates, and jobs. You'll learn how to create and manage projects, configure job templates, run ad hoc commands, and launch and schedule jobs. Additionally, you'll understand the lifecycle of an AWX job and how to automate complex workflows using workflow templates and surveys. You'll also learn about enabling content signature validation to ensure the integrity of your automation content. You will understand project synchronization, job notifications, and how to manage job artifacts. This part is crucial for understanding how to automate your automation, and that's why this guide focuses on it by providing practical examples and best practices.
AWX CLI
Discover the power of the AWX Command Line Interface (CLI). Learn what the AWX CLI is, why it is beneficial, and how to install and authenticate it. You'll also explore generating organization-scoped tokens, managing resources, and importing and exporting data.
Execution Environments and Instances
Gain insights into execution environments and instances. Learn about creating custom execution environments using Ansible Builder and Ansible Runner, adding and building execution environments, and managing execution and hop instances. You will also delve into instance groups, clustering, container groups, and capacity adjustment to optimize your automation infrastructure. This guide covers this part as it is crucial for scaling your automation and ensuring high availability. It not only provides practical examples but also shares how AWX internally works to help you understand the concepts better.
AWX Settings
Explore the various settings in AWX, including authentication, job settings, and logging. Understand how and where to configure settings, manage cache, debug, and logging settings, and other advanced settings to optimize your AWX environment.
AWX Monitoring and Status Views
Understand how to monitor your AWX setup and view status updates. You will learn about different status views like the dashboard, jobs, schedules, and activity streams. Additionally, you will explore management jobs, notifications, logging, and metrics to keep track of your automation processes. If you plan to monitor your automation using Prometheus and Grafana, this guide gives you a head start.
Real World Example
Finally, put your knowledge into practice with a real-world example. Learn how to use custom execution environments and external roles, create workflows, schedule and send notifications, launch jobs using the AWX CLI, AWX API, and from your CI pipelines. This part goes back to the most important part of this guide, which is to provide you with a practical example that you can use as a starting reference for your future automation tasks.
By the end of this guide, you will be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in your AWX adoption journey as an individual or as part of a team.
