What’s New in Tower 3: Notifications

In July, we released Ansible Tower 3. In this blog series, we will take a deeper dive into Tower changes that were all designed to make our product simpler and easier to scale Ansible automation across your environments. In our last post, Jared Tabor, Ansible Tower Software Engineer, highlights what's new in the Tower 3 user interface.

If you’d like to learn more about the release, our Director of Product Bill Nottingham for wrote a complete overview of the Ansible Tower 3 updates.

Introducing Tower Notifications

One of the exciting new features of Ansible Tower 3 is notifications. Tower notifications provide a mechanism of signaling when Tower jobs succeed or fail. This can take the form of sending a message to a Slack channel or sending an HTTP POST to another service to trigger other actions.

In Tower 3 we support the following notification types:

• Email
• Slack
• Hipchat
• Pagerduty
• Twilio
• IRC
• Webhook (POST)

Concepts

There are two important concepts to understand when it comes to notifications in Tower.

1. Notification Templates

These define the properties of where a notification will be sent and who will get notified. If you are using the Slack notification type, then this will include the token and Continue reading

Ansible in GitHub’s Octoverse 2016

Recently GitHub released their State of the Octoverse 2016 which shows some really nice statistics and graphs of top projects, languages and organizations working on open source.

GitHub, in the spirit of full transparency, shared the methodology and queries used to generate the report. We used this dataset to understand where Ansible stacks up. One of the drawbacks in the approach where you are just considering single repositories is that you don’t get a good idea of where a single project broken out into multiple repositories would fall. In Ansible’s case, the project is broken down into three repositories:

• Ansible Core 
• Ansible modules that ship with Ansible Core
• Extra modules that ship with Ansible Core

Let's look at GitHub’s first graphic, Repositories with the most open source contributors. When you just consider Ansible’s Core Project repo we’re just barely out of the top 10 at 11^th place.¹

What does that number look like if we combine all three repositories that make up the Ansible project?²

As far as projects go that would have us in 5^th just behind Patchwork.
One of the facets that was most strange to me was the inclusion of Comments Continue reading