I’m curious as well, The team i work with is getting very nervous about AWX viability at this point with no clear communication about where the project even stands and no releases to show anything.
We unfortunately don’t have the budget for ansible tower so have to wait on AWX or start testing alternatives.
Fellas, it’s been two years since anything has been published in the AWX repository. I think it’s pretty obvious AWX is dead in the water. These “moving forward” updates don’t really amount to much; folks affiliated with the dev team come in to make a few posts, people go “yay thanks for talking to us!” and then another year passes with no significant updates. We’re all nerds, so we’re used to being strung along, and it’s wrong to exploit this innate nature of being a nerd.
I’m sure someone will come in and post about how the AWX repository has activity in it, but it’s shockingly small and fairly inconsequential (given it’s been two years) when it comes to the grander claims of rearchitecting the solution, and of course, there does not appear to be a viable way to run it in kubernetes. Plus, it’s unclear as to whether or not things like LDAP will be implemented in the new design.
For people who aren’t aware of Ascender, which is at GitHub - ctrliq/ascender: Ascender provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is based off the upstream project of AWX. · GitHub this is a fork of AWX before maintenance ended and it’s maintained by ctrliq. They are doing amazing, awesome work over there and actually have a viable product you can run and are even adding new features. I guess maintaining the existing AWX codebase wasn’t such an onerous task given it seems like those guys are more than capable of doing it.
Thanks for the reply,
I am looking at ascender but the install is a bit unusual.
I do not like not knowing what it’s playbooks is exactly doing to my existing cluster.
I also run our test/dev cluster on Rocky 10.2 which isn’t compatible with their installer so im going to have to spin up a whole other cluster just to test it as i do not want to just throw this at my prod cluster (Rocky 9).
Has anyone installed Ascender on Rocky 10, i know i can override the setup.sh script to bypass the version requirement but not sure i want to trash my test/dev cluster either.
I’m more familiar with leveraging the operator type of installation, so I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with what you’re encountering.
Continuing the discussion from AWX modernization: Moving forward:
My experience with Acsender installation is horrific. Nothing worked!
They create a single setup.sh for so many platform, mixing terraform and ansible. It attempts to handle infrastructure and AWX deployment at one go. The process is so complicated that it is practically impossible to debug it if something goes wrong.
And thing go wrong!
I got to speak with some people from CIQ and they admitted that the install process moved between different developers and that is what caused the mess.
I think it would be better if there was a separate installer for each platform. It would be much clearer and much easy to understand and debug.
Personally, I created my own customized terraform scheme for the AWS infrastructure with all the requisites for the AWX deployment and than I used the setup.sh to install only Ascender.
Even that did not go without problems, since not all variables in the Ansible var files are “setable” through the config-vars.sh and not all of them are documented.
Again, to me it looked like the developer of the setup process makes changes to the variable files but forgot to update the setup process.
Any way, once it is deployed, it is the same old wine in a new bottle. It is really AWX in different colors.
By the way, I wasn’t successful with Ledger.
I also had some major issues with it but was able to get them corrected pretty quickly. What environment were you installing on? I was doing k8s so i used the guide here:
I had a firewall problem that prevented the initial install from completing. I havent customized past the basic install. I do know I would need to either have an external database server or a specific storage for the awx database. I think there are options to do that but haven’t dived too deep into it.
As mentioned in my post, I am using AWS.
The setup.sh script is supposed to handle the AWS infrastructure, but it doesn’t cope with it.
That’s why I created my own terraform process to take care of it.
After that I used setup.sh to install only Acsender (and Ledger).
For now, our Ascender project is on ice and we still use AWX.
I had a similarly bad experience trying to install it manually.
I ended up switching to using a helm chart and AKS it went smoothly.
About time red hat provides an update to when releases for awx are going to start again.