Confused about architecture: awx-web, aws-task, rabbitmq and memcached

Archives AWX Project
,
1

Hi all, after some local docker testing, using the docker-compose file located in https://github.com/geerlingguy/awx-container, I am going to deploy a “real” environment, but I have some questions about the installation, because I can’t find the relations between docker images and the documentation:

  • Is a memcached service needed? I don’t see this requirement in the Tower documentation https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/quickinstall/prepare.html
  • What is the difference between awx-task and awx-web? There is no such differentiation in the Tower docs (If I understood well, all nodes are web and workers at the same time)
  • Is a rabbitmq external service needed? According to documentation, a rabbitmq service is installed in each instance (and configured to talk to the other instances? plase confirm), so I don’t understand the externalization. Also, why in all documentation rabbitmq_vhost is set to “tower”? Is this an alias to localhost created during provisioning?

Thanks!

2

You will not find the answer to these questions in the tower documentation because tower installs natively, it does not run in containers.
Yes, memcached is needed.
awx-web is just the web interface, while awx-task is the backend.
Yes, rabbitmq is needed, that’s were your jobs are put in a queue to be executed from. Also, be aware that awx does not work in a cluster with docker, if you plan to have more than one instance. You will need kubernetes or openshift for that.