Streamlining AWX Releases

There’s a new post in the AWX Modernization series at AWX UI and credential types transitioning to the new pluggable architecture.

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I’ve just posted the next forum post in this series, Transitioning authentication and authorization (RBAC) to the new AWX architecture

Dear AWX Team,

I’m excited to see the project evolving, and I understand that such a significant transformation is challenging to execute. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a smooth process!

I’m can’t find the information regarding the duration of the freeze on the AWX and the release of new versions. Do you have any estimates on when the first AWX release with the new changes might occur?

Thanks and Regards,
Kamil

Hi @kmkamyk
Welcome to the Ansible forum, and thanks for your first post!

Glad to hear you like many others are excited for this modernization work.

The refactoring is progressing, due to the depth of the work we are doing, we don’t have visibility into when that status will change, though we realistically expect this work continue well into 2025.

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Thanks, I wanted to know about the prospects of refactoring, so I’m glad to have received the information that that will continue into 2025 :relieved:

Related questions, at this point, are there any planned changes that would make it impossible to use the same deployment methods as before, complicate the deployment of the upstream version using the Operator, or alter the licensing of AWX? The related topic is here.

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Hi AWX Team,

We know you’re working hard on the big AWX refactoring.
How is the work progressing? Could you share any updates or hints about what’s coming? Many of us are very curious.
For example, I’m wondering if future versions will still strictly require Kubernetes, or if other ways to run AWX might become possible. I’m also curious if the project will keep the AWX name :).

Any small details you can share at this stage would be really interesting.

Thanks for all your hard work on AWX!

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Hello colleagues,

I would like to know if a new version will be released in case of a vulnerability or incompatibility with K8s cluster updates.

There will be no more tagged releases for the old AWX architecture. The AWX team is overhauling the old monolithic architecture to a new more modular architecture and framework. Tagged releases will resume with the new architecture when the team feels it is ready for GA.

If you want guaranteed reliability, support, and continued security updates for a stable release, then you will need to look at AAP instead of AWX. Otherwise, you could try building and modifying the AWX container image yourself and at least keep the system packages up-to-date, but you’ll be fighting with stale dependencies.

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An update around this project would be great. Anything at this point.

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Maybe something at ansible fest?

You could try to join the AWX Community Meeting on the second Tuesday of the month and ask.

I have added it as a topic for the upcoming community meeting:

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I’m looking to contribute here, but wanted to be sure the project is accepting PRs. I read that it would but wanted to be doubly sure before I started working on anything. Thanks!

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@kjamaal You are more than welcome to submit PR’s to any open Ansible project!

Keep in mind that active projects may have code quality standards and practices that they expect all contributors to adhere to, but maintainers should provide feedback when reviewing your code so that you can fix and improve anything they require before merging. There are also inactive projects that maintainers may not even notice when you submit new PR’s to them.

In any case, if your PR seems to go unnoticed for more than a week, feel free to create a post in Get Help and link to the PR and any related Issue if one exists. Someone here may be able to help contact a project owner/maintainer to review your PR.

Welcome to forum!

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Good morning @Denney-tech,

There is a plan to share with community a roadmap and/or plan to understand the state of rework and when new release will be proposed?

Stop a release in a open source project without inform/accept PR of the community that work on it, for one year, without any bug fix or package update in current release, in not a good signal of “open”.

I understood that focus is on rework, but my biggest concern is to stay as is for one more year, without any update on code base (I’m not focus on new features but more to bug fix and package update).

I Asked multiple times also to @gundalow and @TheRealHaoLiu but nobody answer me.

Thanks

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I joined the community meeting late but I caught the tail end of the discussion, I think, which was “RedHat summit is next week and there might be news then”. Is that the gist of it?

I’m not able to join in those meetings beacuse sometimes was cancelled after announcement.

In the past was loaded on YouTube channel the playback, but from Jan 2025 no more videos.

First, I am just a fellow community member, but I try to stay up-to-date Ansible news and related topics to help out here on the forum where I can. Secondly, I have no idea when AWX plans to share a detailed roadmap towards a release date, nor do I have any sort of insider information on the matter.

When I received a notification for this thread and saw @kjamaal posted for the first time, I thought this was the “Introduce yourself” post in Social Space, so I was speaking about contributing to Ansible projects in general. Regardless, when I say “open,” I mean any public repository that allows forking and community PR contributions. That has nothing to do with how active or stale that project may be.

The AWX project is undergoing such a major overhaul that it likely will take more than a year to complete into a “ready” state or become “generally available” (GA) for regular users to use. This is largely the reason why no one will answer questions of “how long will this take” because no one can answer that yet. The best thing you can do is keep an eye on awx-modernization for related news, and wait patiently for new releases to begin rolling out.

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Sorry @Denney-tech I’m thinking thst you are from redhat side :smile:.

I know that refavtor will require more than one year, but What is not clear to me why suspend completly the current release for bug fixand/or security fix from community side.

Moreover if team think work to a total refactor that require years to become very stable.

There’s a very simple reason for that: AWX has never had any sort of long-term support guarantee for any version. That is what AAP is for.

Unlike Ansible-core, which maintains each major version as an independent stable branch, which security/bug fixes can easily be cherry-picked and applied to for extended support patching; AWX does not have independent stable branches. The only “stable” branch AWX has is the devel branch. If they wanted to, AWX could create a new branch from the 24.6.1 commit, and then allow the community to maintain it, but that might muddy the water and could be difficult to cherry pick any fixes that should apply to both the old and new architectures.

That said, you could easily fork the AWX repo, switch to the 24.6.1 release tag, and then “patch” your own fork from there and build your own container images to use locally. This is what I was doing at my last job, and at the very least I was able to keep the base UBI9 image and rpm packages up-to-date. Python packages were only updated if the requirements.txt allowed it (which I might have tweaked along the way).