Michael DeHaan

Author Archives: Michael DeHaan

Ansible Tower 2.1 Released

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Today we're excited to release Ansible Tower 2.1, the next version of the UI, Server, and REST endpoint for Ansible Tower. This release adds several major new features:

Surveys may now be created with our easy form builder and can be attached to any job template in Ansible Tower.  When launching a job with an attached survey, the system will prompt the user to answer any number of questions - multiple choice, numeric, text, etc. The results of these questions will then be available as variables in Ansible Tower jobs.  Surveys are graphically constructed from within the interface with no programming required.

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Portal Mode is a simplified view into Ansible Tower. If you have users who are not Ansible experts that need to run Ansible jobs, Portal Mode presents a simple two column view. On one side, there's a list of all the job templates they can launch. On the other side, there's a list of all the completed or in-progress jobs they can view, to know how their job is running.

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Combined, these two features provide solid options for users that want to provide self-service features to others. For instance, admins can let developers or QA departments provision Continue reading

Ansible 1.8 Now Released!

We're sitting out a few days from Thanksgiving in the U.S., and it's time once again to give thanks to people in our free software community.

On a related note, a while back James Martin and I were having a conversation about what the collective noun for Ansible-using-people was. We came up with "Ansiblings" - somewhat because it reminds me of Starcraft zerglings, because we are numerous, aggressive, and get things done fast-- but that's not so much why. More so, because Ansible users are kind of a family.  This year, our way of giving thanks to our family won't be with a tryptofan-soaked turkey (Wikipedia seems to say that's a myth but what do they know?), but rather with another great release of Ansible.

YES -- Ansible 1.8 is now available on PyPi and our official Ubuntu PPA, and will soon be available via other packaging mirrors.  And at this point, Ansible's reached an amazing 919 contributors on GitHub, with over 8400stars and 2600 forks, and you can find a large list of dedicated meetup groups all over too.

One of the most notable features in Ansible 1.8 has been the long Continue reading

Ansible and using Automation to Assert IT Compliance

Like “orchestration”, compliance is a frequently overloaded phrase in IT -- it means very different things to different people. Ansible is frequently used in all sorts of compliance use cases, which we’ll expand on below.

Compliance can mean checking to see if a system has “drifted” from a known state, pushing a system back into line from a different state, or making it conform with a very specific set of (often security related) standards.

Too Fast, Too Furious

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The New Ansible Tower Command Line Tool

Today we're happy to announce a new update to Ansible Tower CLI (link) that provides near 100% coverage of all REST functions within Ansible Tower from a CLI perspective.  The CLI tool can also be imported and used as a library from other python programs.   Tower CLI is open source, under the Apache 2.0 license, so it can be easily mixed into other projects, and we're also happy to take pull requests and ideas on this project.

 

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