How to get Ansible AWX on AWS

This section describes how to launch and connect to Ansible AWX in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

1. Open Ansible AWX (Opensource Ansible Tower alternative) VM listing on AWS marketplace

2. Click on Continue to subscribe.

• Login with your credentials and follow the instruction.

• Subscribe to the product and click on Continue to configuration button.
• Select a Region where you want to launch the VM(such as US East (N.Virginia))

• Click on Continue to Launch Button.
• Choose Action: You can launch it through EC2 or from Website.(Let’s choose Launch from website)

• Optionally change the EC2 instance type. (This defaults to t2.medium instance type, 2 vCPUs and 4 GB RAM.)
• Optionally change the network name and subnetwork names.

• Select the Security Group. Be sure that whichever Security Group you specify have ports 22 (for ssh), 3389 (for RDP) and 80 (for HTTP) exposed.

• Be sure to download the key-pair which is available by default, or you can create the new key-pair and download it.

• Click on Launch..

• Ansible AWX (Opensource Ansible Tower alternative) will begin deploying.

  3. A summary page displays.To see this instance on EC2 Console click on EC2 Console link.

4. On the EC2 Console page, instance is up and running. To connect to this instance through putty, copy the IPv4 Public IP Address

5. Open putty, paste the IP address and browse your private key you downloaded while deploying the VM, by going to **SSH- >Auth **, click on Open. Enter ubuntu as userid

6. Once connected, change the password for ubuntu user using below command

sudo passwd ubuntu

7. Now the password for ubuntu user is set, you can connect to the VM’s desktop environment from any local Windows Machine using RDP protocol or Linux Machine using Remmina.

From your local windows machine, goto “start” menu, in the search box type and select “Remote desktop connection”. In the “Remote Desktop connection” wizard, copy the public IP address and click connect

8. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide the username (e.g “ubuntu”) and the password set in the above “Reset password” step to authenticate. Click OK

9. Now you are connected to the out of box Ansible AWX (Opensource Ansible Tower alternative) environment via Windows Machine.

10. To connect using RDP via Linux machine, first note the external IP of the VM from VM details page,then from your local Linux machine, goto menu, in the search box type and select “Remmina”.

Note: If you don’t have Remmina installed on your Linux machine, firstInstall Remmina as per your linux distribution.

11. In the “Remmina Remote Desktop Client” wizard, select the RDP option from dropdown and paste the external ip and click enter.

12. This will connect you to the VM’s desktop environment. Provide “ubuntu” as the userid and the password set in above reset password step to authenticate. Click OK

13. Now you are connected to out of box Ansible AWX (Opensource Ansible Tower alternative) environment via Linux machine.

14. For connecting via Web Interface, SSH to the VM as shown in Step 5 and run below command-

sudo docker logs tools_awx_1 | grep 'Admin password'

Note down the password for admin user.

15. Login to the web interface by opening the url http://your-external-ip in your browser

16. Use admin as username and auto-generated password

• Note: If Ansible AWS Web Interface is not coming then please check the container status by running below command in Terminal.

sudo docker ps -a

• If the output shows containers in Exited State then please restart the container by running below command and access the Ansible AWS Web Interface after few seconds.

sudo docker start tools_awx_1 tools_postgres_1 tools_redis_1

17. You must change the default password for admin user as security measures by going to admin profile page and entering new password
18. To change the admin password,In left pane click on Users as shown below.

19. Click on admin user, click on edit and enter the new password and save the changes.