Ansible, Inc. the company that provides products, support and services for the popular Ansible open source IT automation project, today announced Ansible Tower 2.0, a major upgrade to Ansible’s complete orchestration, configuration management and application deployment solution for enterprise DevOps teams. Ansible Tower is an elegant user interface (UI) and dashboard that helps enterprise DevOps teams centralize their Ansible IT automation initiatives.

“Ansible Tower is proving to be a mission-critical DevOps tool in organizations like NASA, GoPro, EA, and Hughes,” said Saïd Ziouani, CEO at Ansible. “Tower 2.0 dramatically improves and simplifies the DevOps automation user experience so that our customers can focus on their applications, rather than their IT automation.”

Ansible Tower enhances the Ansible open source engine by providing role-based access control, Ansible job scheduling, auditing and graphical inventory management. Its full-featured REST API simplifies embedding Ansible Tower into existing infrastructure tools, and the Ansible Tower CLI tool allows administrators to take advantage of Tower features without leaving the command line.  In this latest version, the Tower UI is simplified and includes new features such as:

Real-Time Playbook Status
Tower 2.0 allows you to observe application deployments, updates and system configuration changes in real-time, with the ability to drill-down on any failures quickly.  Tower’s real-time output of Ansible Playbooks includes dynamic progress bars that show you the status of jobs and hosts, along with the overall status of the Playbook run.

Expanded Cloud & VMware Support
Pulling cloud system inventories into Tower (and keeping them synchronized) is as easy as entering your cloud account credentials into Tower’s UI.  Along with existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace, Tower 2.0 now supports dynamic inventory synchronization with Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and VMware’s vSphere.  In addition, Amazon Web Services inventory now provides improved support for categorizing the multitude of groups and tags it automatically creates.  As always, Tower manages cloud inventories securely, allowing an administrator to delegate automation jobs to users or teams without having to expose secret credentials.

Pricing and Availability
Ansible Tower 2.0 is available now and can be downloaded with a free trial at ansible.com/tower. With Tower 2.0, Ansible has lowered the cost of getting started with DevOps-style IT automation with the new Tower Starter Kit basic subscription, starting at $99/month or $999/year to manage up to 100 machines.

Additionally, Enterprise Tower support, training & consulting are available directly from Ansible.  See Enterprise pricing at ansible.com/pricing.