AWS Quick Starts

Ansible Tower on AWS

Dashboard for Ansible playbooks, centralized logging, auditing, and system tracking

Deploy on AWS into a new VPC

(or deploy into your existing VPC)
Requires CentOS or RHEL subscription - see guide

View guide — HTML | PDF

Quick Start architecture for Ansible Tower on the AWS Cloud


To deploy Ansible and Ansible Tower on AWS in about 20 minutes, follow the step-by-step instructions in the Quick Start deployment guide.

For additional Quick Starts, see the complete catalog.

ansible-logo

This Quick Start deploys Ansible and Ansible Tower by Red Hat on the AWS Cloud to help manage your IT infrastructure and AWS compute resources.

Ansible automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, continuous delivery, and many other IT processes. It uses a simple language called YAML to manage configuration, deployment, and orchestration tasks, and requires no agents. Ansible Tower is a web-based user interface for Ansible.

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and running small programs, called Ansible modules, to configure the resources for your system. Ansible executes these modules over Secure Shell (SSH) by default, and removes them when finished.

  • What you'll build

    Use this Quick Start to set up the following Ansible environment on AWS:

    • A virtual private cloud (VPC) with a single, public subnet created in the region you choose when you launch the Quick Start.*
    • An Internet gateway to allow access to the Internet.*
    • A Linux client instance deployed into the VPC subnet. This client is tagged with a key for identification and management after you deploy the Quick Start.
    • An Ansible Tower instance deployed into the VPC subnet. The Quick Start automatically deploys Ansible Tower on an EC2 instance that is running CentOS 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.
    • Your choice to create a new VPC or to deploy Ansible Tower into your existing VPC. The template that deploys the Quick Start into an existing VPC skips the tasks marked by asterisks above.


    For details, see the Quick Start deployment guide.

  • Deployment details

    Build your Ansible Tower environment on AWS in a few simple steps:

    1. Prepare your AWS account.
    2. Subscribe to CentOS or RHEL in AWS Marketplace.
    3. Launch the Quick Start. 
      Choose the new VPC option if you want to build a new AWS infrastructure. Choose the existing VPC option if you already have your AWS environment set up. The deployment takes about 20 minutes.
    4. Create a user account for Ansible Tower.
    5. Get a trial license for Ansible Tower.
    6. Configure and manage your EC2 instances in Ansible Tower.


    To customize your deployment, you can choose the instance type for the Ansible Tower and Linux client instances, and configure the IP addresses and CIDR blocks for the VPC and subnet. You can also download the AWS CloudFormation templates that automate the deployment and customize them for your specific scenario.

    For complete details, see the Quick Start deployment guide.

  • Cost and licenses

    You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services and AWS Marketplace AMI used while running this Quick Start. There is no additional cost for using the Quick Start. See the pricing pages for each AWS service you will be using for full details. For AMI subscription pricing, see AWS Marketplace.

    This Quick Start deploys Ansible Tower on the AWS Cloud along with the Linux Ansible client. Ansible Tower is subject to the Ansible Software Subscription and Services Agreement. A free trial of Ansible Tower is available for managing up to 10 hosts. After you deploy the Quick Start, you can follow the step-by-step instructions in this guide to acquire the 10-host trial license.

    Ansible is installed as part of the Ansible Tower installation and is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.