As part of the release of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we’re happy to announce the release of Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6. Ansible Tower is the scalable execution framework of the Ansible Automation Platform, providing an API around automation that you can use to scale automation across your enterprise and integrate automation into your tools and processes.

 

Workflow Pause and Approvals

Not all automation processes can proceed entirely without human input. In Ansible Tower 3.6, we’ve added pause and approval to Ansible Tower workflows to help enable more flexible automation. At any step in a workflow you can pause and wait for an approval from an administrator, or any other you delegate approval permissions to. Need to verify that your deployment was fully successful before updating the external DNS entries? Need to ensure that your developers won’t spin up 300 extra cloud servers when provisioning new dev environments? Now you can do that, integrated directly in Ansible Tower workflows.

 

Customizable Notifications

Notifications were introduced in Ansible Tower 3.0, allowing the status of any job to be reported out via email, Slack, IRC, and more. In Ansible Tower 3.6, we’ve made the content of these notifications fully customizable. All notifications and alerts can be customized for your local environment, include whatever extra details you need, and are templatable with parameters and details from the job run itself, so you can keep your teams updated and informed without them needing to come back to Ansible Tower itself.

 

Webhook integrations with GitHub and GitLab

Ansible Tower’s REST API is the key mechanism that enables automation to be integrated into any process or tool that exists in your environment. With Ansible Tower 3.6 we have brought direct integration with webhooks from GitHub and GitLab, including the enterprise on-premise versions. Now you can trigger jobs and workflows automatically when events happen in your source control – automatically handle setting up internal systems when new repositories are created, automatically run tests on new pushes or pull requests, and even build a fully automated deployment pipeline.

 

Scalable Execution via Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (tech preview)

Your automation needs aren’t static. As you onboard new teams into your automation platform, or take on automating new parts of your infrastructure, you’ll need more automation capacity – and that doesn’t even consider the need to burst your automation capacity for emergency patching or product releases. Available in tech preview, Ansible Tower 3.6 introduces the ability to use an OpenShift cluster directly for job execution – each automation job will spin up a pod in OpenShift, run the automation, and then spin down the pod when finished. This allows you to scale up your automation capacity as needed, without having to think about provisioning new Ansible Tower servers each time.

 

New command-line tool

Ansible Tower 3.6 includes the new awx command-line tool for interacting with Ansible Tower. Replacing the old tower-cli tool, the new supported awx tool makes creating and modifying Ansible Tower resources easy, and launching Tower automation simple.

 

Try Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform today

Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6 includes all of the above, plus a variety of other fixes and improvements. For detailed information on what is new in Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6, please see the release notes.  Ansible Tower 3.6 is available to all Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscribers today. For more information, and to find out how to try the Automation Platform in your enterprise today, visit https://www.ansible.com/products/automation-platform.