On software versioning schema

 July 31, 2024

Last month, the Ansible Forum had a discussion about potential changes that might be implemented in AWX. One aspect that immediately hit me was the decision to move from SemVer to CalVer. More specifically, what struck me was the focus on this change in the initial post and in the comments. Since it took me a while to formulate a whole reasoning behind my perspective, I created this blog post to explain my thought process better.

Use per-host SSH key pairs on AWX and Ansible Automation Controller

 September 18, 2023

One of the aspects that I have always loved about Ansible is that it integrates very nicely with the rest of the system where it is running. For example, you can easily configure all the SSH configurations directly by changing the ~/.ssh/config file. I’ve seen multiple cases where the SSH configuration file needs to be tweaked. A case that comes up occasionally is an environment configured in a way that requires Ansible to use a different SSH key for each machine it manages. I’m aware that this is not an ideal setup since it is not increasing the security as much as the person who came up with such a rule was expecting. Still, it is a requirement that some companies have for various historical reasons and, usually, it is impossible or impractical to challenge. However, the same process applies to any other SSH connection tweaking that can be performed in the SSH configuration file, such as proxies, ciphers, host checks, etc.

Obtain an Ansible Job output from Ansible Tower API

 April 27, 2022

A couple of years back, I wrote a blogpost on obtaining the previous Job ID in Ansible Tower workflow. Now, let’s go further and create another module to obtain the output of such a job.

Before moving further, I want to specify that I talk about Ansible Tower since this is the most known name for this software, but I could also be talking about AWX or Ansible Controller since those are the same codebase. AWX is the open-source upstream project. Ansible Tower is the former name of the Red Hat product based on AWX. Ansible Controller is the name of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 component based on AWX.