Ansible Tower codebase released opensource by RedHat

It took two years but now RedHat opensourced the code of Ansible Tower. Thats awesome! The Project is released on GitHub named Ansible AWX. Since Ansible itself was open source from beginning. The graphical user interface Tower was released under a closed source license until now.

Ansible is a very simple but powerful automation system. I love it for the fact that it doesn't require an agent to be executed on the target machine. It only requires Python to be installed on the managed system. The communication is done using plain SSH and you don't need to configure additional services or open ports for remote management. Works quite well for me for some years now. It is wonderful to see the GUI now open sourced.

If you have a mixed team and want to manage your systems with central automation, a GUI helps a lot to visualize the system management. More people with different skills are able to manage you server farm. You can prepare tasks and roles which than can be applied by everyone in the team, not only the hard core console hackers. If other people see how powerful the automation with Ansible can be, more people dive into it. Now that Ansible is open source from the console to the GUI, more people can contribute and make it a even better solution. The way RedHat is doing their businees with open source is clever. They build production ready products out of open sourced code bases of many projects they support. If you need support and stable maintanance for you Ansible management, consider to invest ito Ansible from RedHat.