How are AWX, Red Hat Ansible Tower and the Automation Controller related?
AWX is the free open-source upstream project. Red Hat builds its commercial Automation Controller on top of it, and the Automation Controller is the product that used to be called Ansible Tower.
All three are the same kind of tool: a central web front end for Ansible, with a REST API, job management, inventories, credentials and role-based access control. They differ in who builds, supports and pays for them:
| AWX | Automation Controller (formerly Ansible Tower) | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Community upstream project | Commercial Red Hat product, part of the Ansible Automation Platform |
| Cost | No licence or subscription | Paid subscription |
| Support | You run, maintain and fix it yourself, with community help | Red Hat support, tested releases |
| Role | Innovation base: new features land here first | Stable, supported downstream of AWX |
"Upstream" means the place where the code is developed first; the commercial product takes snapshots of it, hardens them and adds support. It is the same relationship as Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The name AWX has no official expansion; it is often read as "Ansible Web eXecutable".
Tip: Tower is the old name, Controller is the new name, AWX is the free version of both.
Go deeper:
ansible/awx on GitHub — the upstream project: web UI, REST API and task engine built on top of Ansible.
Ansible AWX documentation — installation and administration of the community version.