Choose ansible version with AWX

[falon (Marco Favero)]

Hello,

I’m quite confused about the best Ansible version to use in my environment.

I would like to use Ansible Community and AWX togheter. Ansible Community in order to develop, AWX for running many developed playbooks and collections.

For develop scope I like Ansible Community 9.x, based on ansible-core version 2.16.

AWX clients run the playbooks developed with Ansible Community 9. AWX 24.6 by default adopts ansible-core 2.15.

Finally, from november 2024, Ansible Community 9.x reaches EOL.

I can’t upgrade to ansible-core 2.17 (shipped with Ansible Community 10.x) for many reasons. Jeff Geerling reports them here.

So if I have to manage OS family like EL8, EL7 I suppose I have to stay with Ansible Community 9.

I would appreciate some hints about AWX, I’m a bit confused. I would like to point out that I’m new to AWX. I read somewhere that with execution environments maybe I can change the ansible-core version. Is it advisable to align the AWX ansible-core version with the ansible-core version of Ansible Community 9.x?

Really I see that the porting from ansible-core 2.15 to 2.16 seems to be very light. So I wonder if I can develop with Ansible 9.x and then run the playbooks using AWX 24.6 as is safely.

I hope to have explained well, there are many “ansible” products and version
Thank you very much for every hints about this argument.
Kind Regards
Marco

[CWollinger]

Hi Marco,

There is no fix dependency between the Ansible and AWX version. You can use or build different EEs (execution environments) and use them in AWX, no matter which version. I use Ansible 2.17 for newer OS systems and 2.16 for RHEL8.

If you build your own EE (with ansible-builder) you can stick to the ansible-core lifecycle and update the community collections individually.

Regards
CWollinger