Is Ansible Tower necessary?

I’m looking to use Ansible as an orchestrater in my small dev environment. The open source version of Ansible is very bare bones; I was wondering if it is necessary to purchase Ansible Tower to really make it work? Or is there full functionality with the open source version?

Thanks.

When you say 'bare bones' I'm not sure what you mean - what features
are you missing?

Tower provides some nice user admin, reporting, and configuration features. You have all the functionality with Open Source version… Is there specific features you’re looking for?

Tower provides accountability and control over who did what and when. If you don’t need that then no you don’t need Tower to do anything that Ansible can do.

There is an open source front end, kind of a FOREMAN to review Ansible jobs but it isn’t the products core use and requires a bit of messing around to get working.

Lots of people certainly use Ansible without Tower; it just depends what
features you need.

There's also ostensibly going to be an open-source version of Tower at
some point; https://www.ansible.com/open-tower is light on details beyond
"some day".

                                      -Josh (jbs@care.com)

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