AWX in Action

What You Will Learn

In this guide, you will embark on a comprehensive journey through AWX, the powerful web-based interface for Ansible. By the end, 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 — straightforward and hassle-free.

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 secure 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.

Orchestrating Automation with 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 orchestrate complex workflows using workflow templates and surveys. You'll also learn about enabling content signature validation to reinforce the integrity of your automation content. You will understand project synchronization, job notifications, and how to manage job artifacts. This chapter is crucial for understanding how to orchestrate 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