Getting started with Ansible Tower

While ansible playbooks are great, sometimes they’re kind of high overhead. Getting tower up and running was a bit of a pain for me traditionally, and the support for kubernetes seemed lacking (at the time of writing).

Until I found the AWX operator. Leveraging the Operator Framework, the operator will manage installation of ansible on kubernetes for you. All you need is a simple, declarative tower config.

Prerequisites

• A running kubernetes cluster. Minikube is fine if you’re just testing locall.

Installation

Traditionally the installation is accomplished through ansible playbooks, but the operator keeps things simple. Under the covers it’s running ansible, but we don’t need to worry about workstation setup or creation of vm’s when we use k8s.

NOTE: In the example below, I’m using openshift.

1. Create a namespace for tower.

k create ns awx

2. Deploy the tower operator.

# Download the tower operator file.
curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/awx-operator/devel/deploy/awx-operator.yaml

# Change the namespace to our default openshift-operators namespace
sed -i '.bak' 's/namespace:\ default/namespace:\ openshift-operators/g' awx-operator.yaml

# deploy.
kubectl apply -f awx-operator.yaml

3. Deploy the tower instance.
   1. Create a file called tower.yaml with the below contents.

     ---
     apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
     kind: AWX
     metadata:
       name: tower
       namespace: awx
     spec:
       deployment_type: awx
       tower_admin_user: your-admin-user
       tower_admin_email: cloud-admin@red8.com
       tower_admin_password: your-admin-pass
       tower_broadcast_websocket_secret: your-difficult-pass
       tower_ingress_type: Route
   

   2. If you’re on vanilla k8s, change the ingress type as shown.

   spec:
   ...
     tower_ingress_type: Ingress
     tower_hostname: awx.mycompany.com
   

4. Deploy tower.

kubectl apply -f tower.yaml 

5. Done.