Ansible Tower and AWX Flashcards

What is Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Ansible Tower/AWX?

Answer: A permission system that grants users and teams specific access levels (admin, use, execute, read) to Tower resources like Job Templates and Inventories

Tower RBAC controls which users and teams can access, modify, or execute specific Tower resources, enabling least-privilege automation governance.

What is a 'Project' in Ansible Tower/AWX?

Answer: A logical collection of Ansible playbooks linked to a source control repository (Git/SVN) that Tower manages and syncs

Projects connect Tower to source control repositories, enabling Tower to pull the latest playbooks and roles automatically.

What are 'Surveys' in Ansible Tower/AWX Job Templates?

Answer: Web forms presented to users before launching a job that collect input variables, replacing the need for --extra-vars at the command line

Surveys enable self-service automation by providing non-technical users with a UI form to specify job parameters without needing Ansible knowledge.

How does Ansible Tower/AWX handle execution environments?

Answer: Execution Environments are container images that bundle Ansible, collections, and Python dependencies, ensuring consistent and isolated job execution

Execution Environments (EEs) solve the dependency management problem by containerizing all automation requirements, replacing the old virtualenv approach.

What is 'Instance Groups' in Ansible Tower/AWX?

Answer: Groups of Tower execution nodes that can be targeted for specific job execution, enabling geographic distribution and workload isolation

Instance Groups allow routing specific jobs to specific Tower execution nodes, enabling workload isolation, geographic routing, and capacity management.

What notification types does Ansible Tower/AWX support for alerting on job completion?

Answer: Email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhook (generic), HipChat, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Grafana, IRC, and Twilio

Tower has extensive built-in notification integrations covering chat platforms, alerting systems, messaging services, and generic webhooks for custom integrations.