Intrance groups nolonger in tech preview in 17.0.1

Hi All,

We are weighing up migrating from AWX 15.0.1 to 17.0.1. We use AWX instance groups for job execution. In 15.0.1 this feature is marked in “tech preview” while in 17.0.1 it is not. I cannot find anything in release notes that would suggest what has changed. Does anyone know?

Rod Oliver

Considerable enhancements have not been made to the instance groups feature. The biggest missing piece is guardrails around jobs in waiting i.e. the number of pods that AWX submits to kubernetes to run. Currently, it’s unlimited. This and some more rigor around the feature is why it’s in tech preview (also that the feature may drastically change in the future). If you understand the limitations, no reason not to upgrade.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. May I presume that even though the label “tech preview” is no-longer present in 17.0.1 as it is in 15.0.1, that we should consider that it is still in “tech preview”? Do you have any sense whether the guardrails that you mentioned are close to implementation?

Rod Oliver

After chatting with another AWX developer, I was wrong to say we don’t currently have guard rails. Awx will respect Kubernetes LimitRange https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/administration/external_execution_envs.html#container-capacity-limits https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/3b520cdeee8f471250234d4632cffa0e0d64db73/awx/main/tasks.py#L1579-L1592

Yes, consider the container group feature to be still in “tech preview”.