Ansible Tower and AWX Flashcards

What is the relationship between Ansible Tower and AWX?

Answer: AWX is the open-source upstream project that Ansible Tower (now Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform) is based on

AWX is the community-supported open-source project; Red Hat Ansible Tower (now Ansible Automation Platform) is the enterprise product built from AWX's codebase.

In Ansible Tower/AWX, what is a 'Job Template'?

Answer: A reusable definition that combines a playbook, inventory, credentials, and settings to create runnable automation jobs

Job Templates are the primary unit of automation in Tower—they bundle everything needed to run a playbook: the playbook source, target inventory, credentials, and execution parameters.

What is the purpose of 'Credentials' in Ansible Tower/AWX?

Answer: They securely store secrets (SSH keys, passwords, API tokens) that are injected into jobs at runtime without exposing them to users

Tower Credentials provide a secure credential store where secrets are write-only—users can use credentials without ever seeing the actual values.

What is a 'Workflow Job Template' in Ansible Tower/AWX?

Answer: A visual workflow that chains multiple Job Templates together, with branching based on success or failure of each step

Workflow Job Templates enable multi-step automation pipelines with conditional branching—on-success and on-failure paths between Job Templates.

In Ansible Tower/AWX, what is the 'Inventory' object and what types does Tower support?

Answer: Inventories define the hosts Tower manages; types include static (manually entered), dynamic (cloud provider sync), and smart (filter-based)

Tower supports static inventories, dynamic inventories that sync from cloud providers or other sources, and smart inventories that filter hosts from existing inventories.

What REST API method would you use to launch a Job Template in Ansible Tower/AWX programmatically?

Answer: POST to /api/v2/job_templates/{id}/launch/

Tower/AWX uses a RESTful API where launching a Job Template requires a POST request to the template's launch endpoint.