There is a myriad of tools that AWX can integrate with—for example, both Red Hat's Satellite 6 and CloudForms products (and their open source Katello and ManageIQ counterparts) provide native integration with both AWX and Ansible Tower. These are just two examples, and this is all possible because everything that we will explore as we progress through this chapter is also accessible through an API and a command-line interface.
This enables AWX to be integrated with a wide variety of services, or you could even write your own that would run a playbook from AWX as a result of some other action, just by calling the API. The command-line interface (called tower-cli, after the commercial Ansible Tower product) is also incredibly useful, especially when it comes to programmatically populating data in AWX. For example, if you wanted to add a host to a static inventory, you could do this through the web user interface (as we shall demonstrate later), the API, or using the CLI. The latter two methods lend themselves incredibly well to integration with other services—for example, a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) could push new hosts into an inventory using the API, without the need for any manual action by the user.
To explore these two integration points further, you can refer to the following official documentation sources:
- The AWX API is documented here: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible-tower/latest/html/towerapi/index.html.
- The tower-cli command is documented here: https://tower-cli.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
Given the wide and varied nature of such integrations, they are beyond the scope of this book—however, it is important to mention them here because it is hoped that, as you read this chapter, you will see opportunities for integration with other services and hence be able to explore this topic further. In the next section of this chapter, we shall get hands-on with AWX and look at a simple deployment. Later in this chapter, this will be followed up with some example use cases.