Ansible Tower Open Source

 September 7, 2017

In October 2015, Red Hat bought Ansible Inc. As far as I know, in the acquisition, two close source components got acquired by Red Hat: Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. Since the day of the acquisition, Red Hat has been very clear on the fact that those two components would have become open source at a certain point, even if there was not a public date or timeline yet. Making a codebase open source is not always easy and quick process. A lot of times many aspects need attention, from a legal review of the commits to a security audit of the code.

In October 2016, Red Hat open sourced Ansible Galaxy. Even thought Ansible Galaxy was surely less appealing then Ansible Tower, since many more people were interested in the latter, I was personally very happy about Ansible Galaxy becoming Open Source. I was probably happier about the fact that it become Open Source “per se” more than anything else. I had no idea where I would have had the occasion to use that code base and up to now I haven’t yet used it for anything productive, but I still see the value of Ansible Galaxy being Open Source.

Today the Ansible Tower team announced the upstream project of Ansible Tower: Ansible AWX. I am hugely happy about it and extremely grateful to everyone that worked heavily in the last couple of years to make it happen.

I’m sure that everyone will benefit from this, from the community to Red Hat to Red Hat customers, since I’m sure Ansible AWX development will get traction and be very fast and I’m sure that over time the quality of the code of Ansible Tower and its features will improve.