Ansible and AWX 1.3 Released

AnsibleWorks Announces Immediate Availability of Enhanced Open Source Ansible and AWX Enterprise IT Automation Solutions

Ansible 1.3 and Ansible AWX 1.3 Supercharge IT Automation

SANTA BARBARA, CA, — August 17, 2013 — AnsibleWorks, Inc., the company behind Ansible, the popular Open Source IT automation solution, announced the immediate availability of new versions of its flagship open source IT automation engine, Ansible 1.3, and its enterprise product, Ansible AWX 1.3. AWX 1.3 supercharges team collaboration for enhanced and efficient infrastructure automation. Both products are available today for download.

Michael DeHaan, CTO of AnsibleWorks, said, “Ansible is all about enabling simplification for IT teams in what they do from a day-to-day process. Our 1.3 release of Ansible AWX will allow teams to get more work done faster and delivers a more integrated workflow experience of how teams really want to deploy software. With enhancements such as the SCM integration feature, it’s just ‘push one button’ to deploy. We don’t want teams to revolve all of their work around Ansible; our goal is for Ansible users to have as much free time as possible for strategic IT tasks because they are using Ansible.”

Open Source Ansible

Ansible is a simple and easy-to-use, Open Source IT automation solution that excels at automating IT activities from application deployment, configuration management, and complex IT automation tasks, such as turning a zero-downtime rolling update of infrastructure into a one-click automated process. Ansible is popular for language simplicity, but also for its network security focus and ability to easily model multi-tier IT processes of all kinds, rather than strictly OS setup tasks. Currently, Ansible is garnering the most number of stars on Github.com for configuration management projects.

New in Ansible 1.3

Ansible 1.3 brings many new features to the open source project, including Accelerated Mode — an improvement over the previous “Fireball” connection mode in earlier versions of Ansible. Using SSH to exchange secure data and then launching an ephemeral high-speed transport, accelerated mode can yield connection speeds of up to 10x over paramiko, and up to 3x over native OpenSSH with Control Persist technology. This allows users to complete already-fast automation runs at even greater speed. Role dependencies and new “role default” capabilities allow increased sharing of roles and more simplified master playbooks.

Most importantly, over twenty new modules extend the Ansible toolbox with many new capabilities, including the ability to manage Arista network devices, manage additional Amazon AWS resources, and deploy to alternative hosting platforms, such as Linode and Digital Ocean.

AWX Supercharges Ansible

AWX supercharges Ansible by providing a modern user interface (UI) and best-in-class REST API on top of the Ansible automation solution. AWX focuses on improving team workflow, role-based access control, centralized logging and push-button access to triggering a variety of IT automation tasks. The new 1.3 release extends these capabilities with many new features.

What’s New in AWX 1.3

AWX is inspired by the automation of DevOps workflow, and 1.3 takes AWX to a new level. The new AWX 1.3 adds built-in source control integration, including the latest versions of content from source control, or creating a new project from a git or SVN repository, without having to dive into the command line. This means kicking off a new automation job becomes trivially easy.

AWX also features a massively upgraded inventory UI for managing hosts, groups and variable data, allowing easy assignment of hosts to different roles and searching the history of hosts over time. Lab staff can receive access to edit inventory but not deploy servers, while developers and IT can receive access to deploy to different sets of resources.

The latest release also brings a new CLI to increase integration capability with Continuous Integration systems such as Jenkins, further improving Continuous Deployment workflows already made easy with Ansible. In addition, LDAP Integration also provides an easy way to centrally manage passwords and control user access.

About AnsibleWorks

AnsibleWorks is the company behind Ansible, the radically simple IT orchestration solution. AnsibleWorks provides an Enterprise ready orchestration platform for IT organizations around an Open Source platform. Working with our Open Source community and partner ecosystem, AnsibleWorks will incorporate key technologies and spearhead community and customer driven innovations alike. Our mission is to enable businesses to easily and securely manage large-scale computing infrastructures on premise and in the cloud.