Ansible, the open source software solution for remote configuration management, announced the availability of Ansible Tower 2.0. Tower 2.0 is a major upgrade to Ansible’s complete orchestration, configuration management and application deployment solution for enterprise DevOps teams.

Ansible Tower allows the management and configuration of servers and groups of servers remotely. In this way it is possible to automate most processes while a centralized control of the various configurations. There are other programs that allow this type of management, among which we can cite Puppet and Chef. The great advantage of Ansible Tower 2.0 is that it helps enterprise DevOps teams centralize their Ansible IT automation initiatives.

Best possible environment for DevOps

Tower 2.0 added several new modules and enhancement to the current modules including an updated dashboard that provides a new heads-up style display for every activity such as recent job activity, quick pointers to lists of hosts with problems, and your current host count in your Ansible environment.

The new improved Ansible Tower CLI tool allows administrators to take advantage of Tower features without leaving the command line. Its full-featured REST API helps you empower your entire configuration management and app deployment solution.

Ansible added real time status update for application deployments, updates and system configuration changes, source control updates or cloud inventory synchronizations. Additionally, Tower 2.0 now supports dynamic inventory synchronization with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and VMware’s vSphere. The Amazon Web Services inventory has been enhanced to support categorizing the multitude of groups.

The relatively easy to use and configure Tower configuration does not rely on agents to be installed on the servers. Ansible Tower 2.0 enhances the best possible IT automation experience through watching your systems configure in real-time, role-based access control and logging of everything happening. The Ansible open source engine is improved for providing role-based access control, Ansible job scheduling, auditing and graphical inventory management.

“Ansible Tower is proving to be a mission-critical DevOps tool in organizations like NASA, GoPro, EA, and Hughes,” said Saïd Ziouani, CEO at Ansible. “Tower 2.0 dramatically improves and simplifies the DevOps automation user experience so that our customers can focus on their applications, rather than their IT automation.”

Back in March this year, Ansible announced the availability of Ansible Tower AMIs on the AWS Marketplace. Ansible Tower AMIs are designed for various deployment options and uses industry-standard SSH to communicate with managed nodes.

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