AWX sets out to solve the problems associated with Ansible automation in an enterprise environment. To maintain our hands-on focus, let's consider the organic growth scenario we discussed in Chapter 1, Building a Standard Operating Environment on Linux. In a small environment where Ansible has been implemented, you might have just one or two key people responsible for writing and running playbooks against the environment. In this small scenario, it is reasonably easy to know who has run which playbooks and what the latest versions are, and the training requirements for Ansible are low as only a small number of key people are responsible for its use.

As the environment scales to enterprise sizing, so do the number of Ansible operators. If all of those responsible for running Ansible have it installed on their own machines, and all have local copies of the playbooks, suddenly the management of that environment becomes a nightmare! How can you ensure that everyone is using the latest versions of the playbooks? How do you know who ran what and what the outcome was? What if a change needs to be run out of hours? Can you pass the Ansible job off to a Network Operations Center (NOC) team, or is that not possible because they would need training on how to use Ansible?

AWX sets out to address all of these challenges, as we shall see subsequently, starting in the next section, where we look at how AWX can reduce your staff training costs.