What's New in Ansible Tower 3.5

May 29, 2019 by Chris Short

RedHat-Tower-Social-2

We're excited to announce that Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.5 is now generally available. In this release, there are several enhancements that can help improve automation practices. Engineering has been working hard to enhance Ansible Tower and here are a few things we're most excited about:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support
  • Support for external credential vaults via credential plugins
  • Become plugins now supported in Ansible Tower

In addition to a number of enhancements that have been made, the Ansible Tower 3.5 release saw over 160 issues closed. Let’s go over the highlights in this release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an innovative operating system, designed to provide a consistent foundation for the enterprise hybrid cloud. It offers one enterprise Linux experience  for applications across IT environments. With Ansible Tower 3.5 (and Ansible Engine 2.8), support for managing RHEL 8 nodes is baked in. Ansible Tower 3.5 can also be run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as the control node for Red Hat Ansible Automation.

External credential vaults

Ansible Tower 3.5 brings support for external credential vaults. The existing credential store is still available for use. However, as enterprises grow credentials often need to be made more available for distributed applications. In this release, Ansible Tower now supports corporate standard password and key storage directly from Ansible Tower.

With a special thanks to our partners, Ansible Tower 3.5 now supports the following external vaults:

  • HashiCorp Vault
  • CyberArk AIM
  • CyberArk Conjur
  • Microsoft Azure Key Vault

If you’d like to learn more about incorporating any of these new credentials vaults please read the Secret Management System documentation.

Inventory and Escalation Plugins

As Red Hat Ansible Engine produces advanced features, Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.5 can consume them. This release brings a variety of advanced Ansible Engine features to Ansible Tower users. Two in particular worth highlighting are Inventory Plugins and Privilege Escalation Plugins.

With the new Inventory Plugins, Ansible Tower can now utilize a variety of sources for its inventory to include the new Ansible Engine plugins for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This helps enable out of the box connection capabilities to hybrid cloud enterprise environments.

The new Privilege Escalation Plugins handle complex privilege escalation in your enterprise environment. For users who need to go beyond ‘sudo’ or ‘su’, Ansible Tower is there with features that allow for more granular control of which user executes tasks on managed systems.

Other enhancements

Extended list display

We’ve improved the list display to make it easier to use, and utilize space better. Lists can now be expanded to show details, and collapsed to show more items. Lists can be sorted by most important fields and filtered by nearly any property.

Enhanced metrics

There is also a metrics endpoint which can be used with tools like Prometheus to monitor Ansible Tower (/api/v2/metrics). This will enable Ansible Tower metrics to be shared amongst a variety of cloud native applications and several monitoring platforms.

Learn More

Try Red Hat Ansible Tower today

Ansible Tower 3.5 is available now. You can try the latest version of Red Hat Ansible Tower via local install, Vagrant, or Amazon AMI.

Webinar

Also, please join us for our What's New in Ansible Automation webinar on June 4th at 2PM EDT to hear about the latest updates to Red Hat Ansible Tower as well as Red Hat Ansible Engine.

AnsibleFest

Join us September 24-26, 2019. We will follow the same format as last year with a Welcome Party on the evening of September 23, two days of content on September 24-25, and some add-on options, like workshops, on September 26. Sign up for AnsibleFest announcements so you don’t miss any of these important dates. And don’t forget for those who want to tell their awesome Ansible Automation story, to submit your talk during our open Call for Proposals for AnsibleFest Atlanta here. The CFP will close on June 4, 2019.

Share:

Topics:
Ansible Tower


 

Chris Short

Chris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines including systems, security, networks, and DevOps engineering and advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Ansible team at Red Hat. Chris is a partially disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about DevOps and other topics at chrisshort.net. He also runs the DevOps, Cloud Native, and open source focused newsletter DevOps’ish.


rss-icon  RSS Feed