AWX Office Hours Agenda - Jan 10 2023

[john-westcott-iv]

AWX Office Hours

Proposed agenda based on topics

• Discussion around Redis cache if @mani3887 is available.
• Decouple web and task containers @TheRealHaoLiu.
• Smart Inventory hostvars @AlanCoding.
• Open discussion as time permits.

What

After a successful Contributor Summit in October, one of the bits of feedback we got was to host a regular time for the Automation Controller (AWX) Team to be available for your folks in the AWX Community, so we are happy to announce a new regular video meeting.

This kind of feedback loop is vital to the success of AWX and the AWX team wants to make it as easy as possible for you - our community - to get involved.

Where & When

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 10th, 2022 at 1500 UTC

• Google Meet
• Via Phone PIN: 842522378 Guide

This meeting is held once a month, on the second Tuesday of the month, at 1500 UTC

How

Add one topic per comment in this GitHub issue

If you don't have a GitHub account, jump on #awx:ansible.com on Matrix and we can add the topic for you

Talk with us

As well as the fortnightly video meeting you can join the Community (inc development team) on Matrix Chat.

• Matrix: #awx:ansible.com (recomended)
• libera.chat IRC: #ansible-awx (If you are already setup on IRC)

The Matrix & IRC channels are bridged, you'll just have a better experience on Matrix

Links

AWX YouTube Chanel
Previous Meeting
Meeting recording
Next Meeting

See you soon!

[john-westcott-iv]

From @mani3887:

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the AWX office hours. I went through the recording and other videos listed in Ansible AWX community. The videos were helpful in giving clarity of some of the designs followed in AWX. We are running AWX version 21.4 in AKS cluster. At our application we observe a below issue:

When AWX control pod restarts, it seems like it abandons the previous control pod's AWX EE pods, i.e. it seems like the new AWX control pod does not detect the already running AWX EE pods. Would it help if we move the redis cache from in-memory to cloud(azure redis cache)? Is there support for this in AWX? If there is, if we have multiple AWX replicas, and all having redis cache in cloud, would there be sync issues across the AWX instances? I understand that if we did move to a cloud-based solution from in-memory, the latency would be higher.
We had the below questions:

Redis cache - In the videos, it has been mentioned that in-memory redis is primarily used for dumping the logs, dispatcher gets the logs from EE pods, sends it to redis cache, the callback handler gets this from the redis cache and dumps it in the DB. Is the redis cache used for any other functionality? Is this only for the ansible job output logs or it also does the same for the metadata of the job? In our application, we are currently re-directing the Ansible logs(executed on EE pod) to a mounted file share; would the AWX still gather the logs and forward it to dispatcher? we have a solution for transferring the logs, but ideally we would want the metadata for the logs as well.
Role of AWX task container especially during the spinning up of the new pods; does it reconcile with the DB and then spin up the pod; while viewing the youtube videos, it seemed like when we hit the launch button on the UI, a pod would move to Pending state, my question is: would this information also be stored in the DB?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Mani

[john-westcott-iv]

From @TheRealHaoLiu

Proposal: Decouple Rsyslog from web and task subsystem
#13183

[john-westcott-iv]

From @AlanCoding

Discussion: solution for smart inventory hostvars issue
#371

#1999

There are major technical reasons it's unlikely we'll fix both of those issues with updates to smart inventory. I am working on a proposal that we solve the problem via a new inventory type, #13214, combined with a new inventory source type that allows using the constructed inventory plugin. Since so many users reported that the problem is a blocker for using smart inventory, I thought we could get meaningful feedback on the solution approach.

[kurokobo]

@john-westcott-iv
This is not topics for office hours, but how about enabling Discussions feature on GitHub on this repo and moving all issues that discussing about Office Hours?
Office Hours is a good topic for using the Discussions featurr, and that can keep Issues clean to track bugs and RFEs, I think.

[nickjmv]

A tutorial on how to enable SAML via the extra_settings instead of the GUI.

This would (probably) be a solution for this: #12238

[TheRealHaoLiu]

@kurokobo awesome suggestion! I'm playing around with discussion now it seems very fitting for what we need!