Enterprise Automation with AWX (upstream for Ansible Automation Platform)

Just like the Fedora Linux Project is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the AWX Project is the upstream for Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform. In this session, Thomas Cameron will walk you through getting started with AWX. This presentation will use nothing but Open Source projects like CentOS Stream and AWX available at zero cost, but is applicable to the commercial Ansible Automation Platform product.

In this session, Thomas Cameron will demonstrate installing AWX on CentOS Stream. Then he will configure an organization, add systems to the AWX server, ensure that the ssh key is configured, and demonstrate syncing playbooks from public and/or private repositories so that you can run complex jobs on your CentOS, Fedora, or other distributions.

This presentation will go through the various features of AWX, including how to define a organizations (think teams, departments, or other corporate organizations), define inventories (groups of hosts), define credentials (ssh keys and how we escalate privleges and potentially a GitHUB credential), define projects (playbooks you would add via public or private git repositories), create templates (what playbooks you're going to run against which systems), schedules (for repeating tasks), and notifications (send an email if a job fails, for instance).

Once this is all set up, Thomas will do a live demo of taking a two systems which have no software installed beyond the base operating syste to a two-tier application with a front end web server and a back end database server.