Today we're excited to release Ansible Tower 2.1, the next version of the UI, Server, and REST endpoint for Ansible Tower. This release adds several major new features:
Surveys may now be created with our easy form builder and can be attached to any job template in Ansible Tower. When launching a job with an attached survey, the system will prompt the user to answer any number of questions - multiple choice, numeric, text, etc. The results of these questions will then be available as variables in Ansible Tower jobs. Surveys are graphically constructed from within the interface with no programming required.
Portal Mode is a simplified view into Ansible Tower. If you have users who are not Ansible experts that need to run Ansible jobs, Portal Mode presents a simple two column view. On one side, there's a list of all the job templates they can launch. On the other side, there's a list of all the completed or in-progress jobs they can view, to know how their job is running.
Combined, these two features provide solid options for users that want to provide self-service features to others. For instance, admins can let developers or QA departments provision their own machines, with simple questions like "what version of the application should be installed". Or junior admins can launch repetitive tasks (like password changes) with the press of a button.
Tower 2.1's new, wizard-based installer now supports installation onto External PostgreSQL Databases, including cloud storage such as Amazon RDS. High Availability (HA) options are now supported, as well -- multiple Tower secondaries can be installed, and any secondary can be upgraded into an active primary at any time with a simple command structure. Those installing will notice a new configuration wizard that prompts the user through the available options.
Among other features, user supplied Dynamic Inventory Scripts can be easily added into Ansible Tower to synchronize Ansible Tower’s list of machines and groups with any external source of truth. As with previous versions, native support is also provided for Amazon, Google, Rackspace, VMware, and Azure without having to drop in a script - just enter in your credentials and go.
Learn more about Tower here or go ahead and download the latest version now!
Sign-up for our "What is New in Tower" webinar on January 14th
