Ansible open-sources Ansible Tower with AWX
If you're considering using this (or any similar) tool, please keep in mind that you're adding a lot of attack surface.<p>Your Ansible master is one of the most critical (if not <i>the</i> most critical) machine in your network. It has unrestricted access to everything, including a very detailed list of what and where everything is. If it's compromised, it's over.<p>Something like Ansible Tower adds a LOT of attack surface. Instead of a locked-down server exposing a public key-only SSH port, you suddenly have a whole web application stack in there. Your browser and every Chrome extension with full page access now has root access to your network (and don't get me started on potential CSRF or XSS vulnerabilities...).<p>If you don't need any of the enterprise-ey features, just might be better off with plain Ansible and Ara[1], with the latter running on a separate machine. A "sudoers" rule is much more secure than any ACL in a web application backend.<p>If you do want to use Tower, you need to think about these risks and how you mitigate them. Of course, this also applies to any similar tool like Jenkins, Rundeck, CircleCI or whatever if you give them production credentials.<p>[1]: <a href="https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/" rel="nofollow">https://ara.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</a>