Is there a future for AWX?

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I’m being asked quite frequently, e.g. during AWX trainings I give, whether there’s a future for AWX. The project itself notes on the main repository:

The last release of this repository was released on Jul 2, 2024. Releases of this project are now paused during a large scale refactoring.

There’s been an occasional post about refactoring here on the forum, but if I’ve been paying attention these posts are also roughly a year old, and not much is being said about AWX.

I’m asking as a community member: can anybody on the AWX project shed some light on the future of AWX?

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I’ll follow this thread, as I have the same questions as well.

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Y’know I was just thinking of this too. It’s been about a year since the rearchitecture had been announced, and while I see activity on the AWX repository and some of the other github repositories, I was curious if there were any specific updates. A demo or sneak peak of progress that’s been made would be cool.

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I’m just a community member like you, so I have no inside knowledge. However, looking just now at the commit activity in https://github.com/ansible/awx since July 2024 is rather more encouraging than I expected. There was a branch made around the end of July ‘24, and a steady stream of commits to both devel and this other branch from then until now. Many of those changes’ commit messages start with AAP-#### indicating their association with an item in a Jira epic. A few others cite CVEs, and a good number look like “plain old work”. There’s also a notable section of removals - particularly authentication methods - which fits well with the stated intention of moving such functionality to a more modular plugin architecture.

The last commit, from Thursday of last week, is “Merge remote-tracking branch ‘awx/devel’ into merge_26_2”. The most recent tag is “24.6.1” from July 2, 2024. I could be misreading tea leaves, but I’m feeling better about the future of AWX after having looked over these commits than I’ve felt in a long time. Thanks for prompting me to look.

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This thread is of interest to me, as I’m trying to productionise an AWX instance.
There’s been push-back from execs about support and concerns about both the future of AWX and the maturity of the UI RBAC model.

I had a meeting with Red Hat yesterday to get indicative AAP pricing and they said that Red Hat had stopped contributing to AWX some time ago, and all their engineering efforts were now in ansible core.

This may be their official position but looking at the commit history for the AWX project over the last month I see a number of Red Hatters contributing (unofficially?). A reduction in engineering resources would explain a lot.
It seems like things are ticking along, but it would be nice to get more comms out and a better idea of when the next release will drop?

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So many crickets. It’s an open source project, so I understand, I don’t really have any right to ask, “what’s the hold up.”

On the balance though, Red Hat employees are the ones developing this. If you want free QA from people who run the upstream stuff, it’s a good idea to communicate direction and status.

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For reference, this “pause” was discussed at length in Streamlining AWX Releases . Now, that post and its comments are all from July last year, so it might be time for a refresh.

Update. See also:

@gundalow , I feel this might be yours to chip in, but if not, by all means let us know whose door we should knock on. Thanks!

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Yep, some official feedback on this would be very welcome.

(This is not just for AWX itself, but also for the collection awx.awx, which hasn’t seen a release since over a year as well.)

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An update was posted by an RH employee in June:

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Great to hear. But then, it’s from almost four months ago, so some update - or estimated time until the refactoring is complete - would be great. I would imagine there is a plan and a rough timeline, especially now that the refactoring has been going on for almost 15 months.

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I’m also curious what Automation Hub is doing. Has RH basically been delivering the same old version for the last 15 months to customers, without any new features?

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I should clarify that I know a bit about how open source works and that I don’t think we’re expecting to hear a {{ date }}. The background to my question is simply to know whether AWX actually has a future.

Monday/Tuesday I did another AWX course with 12 people in it, and towards the end most of them wanted to know how AWX is progressing. I showed them my tea leaves.

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I just stumbled over release notes for a version 2.6

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Hey everyone, I’ve tried writing a couple replies to this thread but keep backing away. But, as a member of the Ansible community team and a Red Hat employee, I feel compelled to at least say something.

I think it’s safe to say there are many folks, including Red Hatters like myself, who share similar feelings of frustration with the pace of change.

From what I can tell, it seems to be the case that the AWX modernization work is just still ongoing. For the record, though, I’m not part of that engineering team. So please take what I say with a pinch of salt.

The crickets aren’t great though, not going to lie. It seems apparent that there is lots of room to improve in the communication about this effort.

After AnsibleFest I came back energized to try and compose an update to the AWX modernization series that myself and mainly @gundalow had posted. I had some really positive conversations at the booth with folks like @bostonlinux who had expressed interest in kicking the tyres on the dev container and providing feedback.

In the end I just didn’t get anywhere with that post because it seemed like I could either go into enormous detail or none. And, like I said, I’m also not really involved with the modernization effort in my day to day.

But going back to some of those conversations at AnsibleFest, what I found energizing was talking about the problems out there and how AWX solved them. There was a range from the usual things like scheduling jobs to providing a UI entry point into Ansible for people on the team who were not comfortable with the command line. I really learned a lot.

And those conversations lead me to ask a different question, “What does the future of AWX look like?” because it certainly seems like there is a future. I have my own thoughts on this but, again, I’m not any sort of authority so this probably isn’t helping all that much.

Really the best thing I think I can do is to work towards better communication with you, the Ansible community. That doesn’t mean I’m going to try and create a roadmap or anything. But what I will do is take this up with @gundalow and see what we can do to improve communication. Cheers.

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There is at least one other downstream AWX product that tries to fill the void by no-awx-community-release - from the rocky linux people: 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.

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Thank you for your comments. I get the same impression from folks on our account team. I appreciate your acknowledgement and look forward to some further communication from folks directly involved.

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My main concern is the lack of clarity around the current state of the devel branch. I’ve been wanting to create a new credentials plugin for some time, but I’ve held off because that area is being reworked as part of the ongoing re-architecture.

If I were to pull the latest devel branch and run it in the docker-compose dev environment
, I honestly have no idea what to expect. What makes contributing to this project or the ansible eco system quite hard.

Is it a mostly functional environment with a few bugs, or is it currently non-functional?

The only updates I’ve seen are along the lines of:

“XXX has been migrated to DAB”
“The GUI is now in ansible-ui”
“Credentials are moving to a pluggable architecture”

But it’s still unclear how stable or usable the devel branch actually is right now. Are the feature/moves done,WIP, rough around the edges?

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I’m getting a bit of a bad feeling about the future of open source AWX with the release of AAP 2.6.

It looks like AAP 2.6 is either still based on AWX 24.6.1 (which is already over a year old ) or they’ve used a newer version but haven’t released the corresponding calendar-tagged version. If it’s the latter, it’s a bit strange that they wouldn’t just tag that branch.

Also, it feels a bit odd that a major refactoring is happening while Red Hat is still able to release both AAP 2.5 and 2.6 during that time.

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Yes, a colleague of mine, reported a bug and PR for fixing it. It’s still open upstream, but fixed in AAP. That’s not how open source should work.

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That’s indeed very strange, and definitely not how this should work. I’m CC’ing @SteeringCommittee since this is a potentially very serious problem. Maybe some of the RH employees that are members of @SteeringCommittee can try to find out more?

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